


Balance of Trust

by Sholio



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Development, Comfort Food, Developing Friendships, Enemies to Friends, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Redemption, Slow burn friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:33:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27696323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: It's not the first time Maria Rambeau has had an alien in her living room, but it's definitely the most awkward. Yon-Rogg is seeking sanctuary. Maria just wants to stop having to deal with this kind of crap.
Relationships: Maria Rambeau & Yon-Rogg, Monica Rambeau & Yon-Rogg
Comments: 17
Kudos: 71
Collections: Heart Attack Exchange 2020





	1. Maria

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lirin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/gifts).



> My betas were invaluable on this one! Many thanks to Scioscribe for the general beta and helpful suggestions for where to add more h/c; Edonohana for answering all my questions about what Maria might do post-Air Force that would fit with my plot (i.e. a job where she stayed home all the time) and then helping me figure out what that might look like; and Sheron for general cheerleading and handholding while I sent her endless Discord messages about how this fic just _would not end._ You are all the best! ♥

The object beside the bed was beeping.

Maria thrashed her way, groaning, out of a deep sleep, and opened her eyes to find that the bedside thing was not only beeping but also bathing her bedroom in glossy blue light.

"Huh," she murmured thickly, rolling over to reach for it. "Never done that before."

Carol had given to her two years ago, on one of her infrequent visits to Earth. It was palm-sized and sleek and silver, very Star Trek. In Maria's hand, it felt a little like the joystick controller of an A-10 Warthog. There were no buttons; it was just a terminal—or remote, or contact, or something—for the main bulk of the thing, which was in the downstairs rec room closet. Maria had immediately forgotten what it was actually called (the words “vortex” and “transducer” were involved) as soon as Carol had explained what it did.

"You have a fucking _Star Trek transporter,"_ Maria had said, and Carol had laughed and started trying to explain how it was different. It was single-use-only, an expensive bit of hardware developed as an emergency escape route for the wealthy and powerful. There were much better transporters out there, a fact which Carol casually dropped into conversation and Maria quietly boggled at, but this was a portable one that could be wired into the power in the Rambeaus' house.

It was keyed to Carol, Maria, and Monica. Nobody else could use it. Carol had had Maria and Monica each prick their finger on a little finger pad, and that was it, personal transporter tuned in, no intruders need apply.

And now the remote was beeping and flashing. Maria fumbled with it, held it close to her nose, tried and failed to figure out how to shut it off, and then her brain woke up all the way and she realized that whatever it was doing, most of it would be happening downstairs, so she'd better get down there.

She rolled out of bed in her pajama pants and sleeping shirt, shoved her feet into slippers, and stumbled out into the hall. Even from here she could see light strobing downstairs.

"Mom?" Monica called blearily from the darkness behind the half-open door of her room. "What's going on?"

"Go back to sleep," Maria called back. "Everything's fine."

Everything had damn well better be fine. She trusted Carol quite literally with her life, and even more importantly with her daughter's life. What she didn't trust was alien technology capable of transporting a space nuke or a Kree army into her living room. She had accepted the thing because it gave Carol a back door to Earth and it gave Maria and Monica the ability to escape in a hurry if they had to, but now that someone appeared to be actually using it, she all of a sudden found herself thinking of twenty reasons why this was a bad idea.

"Carol?" she called as she stepped off the stairs into the living room. The open door to the rec room was on her left, glimmering with blue light; the kitchen was on her right. There was a gun in the kitchen, taped under the sink, and another in the gun safe back in her bedroom. She wished now she'd stopped for the upstairs one, but she didn't want to take the time to make a side trip upstairs or into the kitchen. She needed to get to the rec room, because whatever was happening was happening now.

She grabbed a broom from the closet under the stairs. It was a terrible weapon, but it made her feel marginally better to have it in her hands.

Strobing blue light filled the rec room, shining out of all the cracks around the closet door. Maria took a deep breath and threw the closet door open.

Until a couple of years ago, the closet had been full of old VHS tapes and boxes of books to go back to the used book store and pingpong paddles and a broken vacuum cleaner and a bunch of other junk. Now the machine nearly filled the space. It was essentially a person-sized loop, made of something white and shiny that was neither metal nor plastic, set on a wide base that was wired into the house power through a fat extension cord that Carol had spliced directly into the wall using her hands in lieu of tools.

And now it was glowing like a county fair glo-stick.

Maria stumbled backward as a glowing blue blob materialized in the middle of the loop. She reached for the light switch on the wall and flicked it on.

The light stayed on for all of a second or two before there was a tremendous _crack,_ a bright flash and a loud pop from the light bulb overhead, and then the room was plunged into near darkness.

Near darkness, not total darkness, because the person in front of her was glowing faintly. A tracery of glowing green lines outlined a very familiar suit of armor, and cast enough light in the room to dimly see by. It wasn't enough light to see clearly the face above the armor, but when he raised an arm and pointed it at her and the sleeve of the armor lit up with a brighter green glow, Maria knew in a moment of frozen horror who she was looking at.

"You're not Vers," Yon-Rogg said.

"You," Maria gasped.

She flipped the broom around in a single fast movement and drove the handle at his throat. He caught it with his opposite hand. The broom stopped dead; it might as well have been embedded in cement. Maria was caught in mid-attack, staring at him while her heart tried to drum its way out of her chest.

And then, worst of all, there was the soft padding of feet on the stairs. 

"Mom?" Monica's voice called from the living room.

"Go back upstairs!" Maria's voice emerged as a strangled squeak until she managed to catch a full breath. "Go upstairs, go to your room, shut the door and _don't open it!"_

"But—" Monica began. 

"Now!" Maria bellowed.

The teenager-sized footsteps retreated quickly. Maria didn't dare take her eyes off Yon-Rogg, who stared at her in the near-dark—his eyes were pale enough to catch the light—and then slowly shoved her backwards. She planted her slipper-clad feet on the carpet. It didn't help; she was pushed across the floor as if she weighed nothing.

The gun. God help her, she should have taken the time to grab the gun.

"Where's Vers?" Yon-Rogg asked, at the same moment as Maria gasped out, "What did you do to Carol?"

There was an instant's hush. They stared at each other down the length of the broom by the glow of his armor.

"She's ... not here," Yon-Rogg said slowly. "Is this your planet? Why, by the Supreme Leader, did I come _here?"_

"What the fuck did you do with Carol?" Maria burst out, trying to wrench the broom out of his hand. She might as well try to move a bulldozer with her bare hands.

"Why do you think I did anything with her?"

"Because she's the only one who can use that thing! You—" Maria caught her breath and bit off the rest of it. She was incandescently furious, but starting to regain enough of her wits to realize that it was probably not a good idea to antagonize the guy in the power armor. 

He tilted his head, the light catching his eyes again, catlike. "She put a bloodlock on it," he said slowly.

Maria dropped the other end of the broom and dashed out of the room, headed for the kitchen.

She was half expecting to be cut in half by a laser beam, or if not that, to feel his armored hand wrap around her neck. But she made it to the kitchen and fumbled under the sink for the Glock. It was duct-taped in place. She tore it free and straightened up, spinning around.

He was behind her, standing in the open-plan kitchen doorway, a dim green-limned shape in the dark.

"This is as unexpected for me as it is for you," he said.

"Fuck," Maria ground out, "you." She leveled the Glock at his head. "Do you know what this is?"

"One of your primitive weapons?"

"That's right, it sure is. I'm going to put a bullet in your skull unless you tell me why you're here and _what the hell you did with Carol."_

"I haven't even _seen_ her," he said, sounding abruptly annoyed. There was a gritty, rasping undertone to his voice, and it registered on Maria for the first time that he seemed very tired. "I used a last chance failsafe and came here. Did she actually get her hands on a portable subspace vortex transducer? Those things cost a fortune."

"Shut up!" Maria barked out, trying to think. Oh God. Carol and Yon-Rogg had shared blood. Carol must not have realized it would work that way, or she would never have left the transporter with Maria. 

"You told me to tell you—" he began.

"Shut. Up."

Yon-Rogg drew in a breath. "Look, tell me where Vers is—"

"I don't fucking _know!_ And stop calling her that!"

"Right," he said, and turned abruptly. With her nerves on a hair trigger, she very nearly shot him on pure reflex, but then he vanished into the living room. 

Gun in hand, Maria ran to the living room, just in time to see him open the front door. It had been locked for the night, but he twisted the knob with no visible effort and there was an audible snap that echoed through the room. He left the door standing open and disappeared from sight.

By the time she got to the door, he was gone. She stared out into the insect-shirring darkness of their country road—now even darker without the yard lights, although the neighbors' lights were still on. The transporter's power surge had blown out their power, but it hadn't blacked out the entire neighborhood.

She pulled the door shut. The knob spun loosely in her hand, and she had to throw the deadbolt to get the door to stay closed. He had broken it with his bare hands, like it was nothing.

Fear-sweat prickled on her body in the dark. 

Yon-Rogg. The man who had captured her friend, who had _lied_ to her friend, who had taken away all that Carol was, and tried to kill them, and killed a lot of other people over the years, and brought his Kree buddies to her planet once already ...

Was out there. In Louisiana. Doing God only knew what.

"Jesus Christ on a flying purple skateboard," Maria groaned. There was a quiet gasp from the stairs. Maria gritted her teeth. "Sweetheart, I told you to go upstairs."

"But ..." Monica began. "Is that man an alien?"

Aliens. Nick Fury. SHIELD could handle this. Maria marched over to the hall credenza—or meant to; in the dark, she stumbled into the sofa and yelped.

"Mom?"

"I'm fine. Go back upstairs." She felt her way forward. There was a flashlight in the credenza, and she used it to find the otherwise unmarked business card that had the number of a private line to SHIELD. She stood there holding it.

"Mom, is the power out?"

"I think we blew a breaker," Maria said absently. She ran a thumb across the card. She could call SHIELD. They would take care of things. That was what they were for.

And then she thought about how he hadn't shot her. How he'd walked out instead. She knew what that armor could do. She knew what he could have done. 

_There's more to this than I know. And I need to find out what. Calling SHIELD is the nuclear option. We're not there yet._

"Mom, what's going on?" Monica asked.

Maria got herself together and shoved the gun into the waistband of her pajama pants to free up her hands. "Someone used your Aunt Carol's transporter."

"Whoa, cool," Monica said.

"Yeah, the jury's still out on that, kid."

Maria lit her way into the rec room with the flashlight. There was a strong smell of burning plastic. She tried the wall switch—no luck—and shone the light around the closet. The white encircling loop had half-melted and sagged, but nothing was glowing or sparking or even hot to the touch.

With Monica behind her, she went into the utility room and swept the flashlight across the breakers. Nothing was tripped that she could find. She tried flipping some of them on and off anyway. The power stubbornly stayed out.

"Great," she muttered.

"So is this like, a friend of Aunt Carol or what?" Monica asked, tucking her hands under her arms. It was October and starting to cool off at night.

"Not a friend. Definitely not a friend." Maria sighed. She was going to either have to call SHIELD or round him up herself. She couldn't just leave a potential hostile running around out there. Calling SHIELD would be the easy way, but ...

But she didn't _trust_ them, was the thing. She didn't particularly want to invite them back into her life unless she had to. The minute that she dropped all of this in Nick Fury's lap, she'd lose control; it was like setting a roller coaster with no brakes into motion.

Making an abrupt decision, she turned and pressed the business card into Monica's hands.

"After I leave, stay inside and keep the doors locked."

"Mom, what—"

"If I'm not back in an hour, call the number on this card," she pressed on. "And tell the person who answers everything that happened here tonight."

"I don't even _know_ what happened, because you won't tell me!"

Maria put an arm around her daughter and kissed her forehead. Monica was almost as tall as she was; she couldn't even remember when that had happened. "Tell them Aunt Carol's transporter lit up and an alien came out, and your mom went after him."

"Are they dangerous?" Monica asked quietly, leaning into Maria's side.

The answer, of course, was yes. But she didn't want to say that. "I'm just going to talk to him," she said instead. "Go up to your room. I'll be back very soon."

"But if you're not—"

"Call that number," she said, and kissed Monica's forehead again.

***

She took her car keys and wallet and the gun, and shoved her feet into proper shoes instead of bedroom slippers. She was still wearing pajama pants and an oversized Air Force T-shirt, but she wasn't particularly concerned about maintaining a stylish image while hunting for a mass-murdering alien who had materialized in her house in the middle of the night.

 _He's going to be gone,_ she thought as she started the car and laid the Glock on the passenger seat in easy grabbing reach. _He'll take off like a rocket into the night sky and the next thing we know, a fleet of Kree warships are going to be targeting our major cities. I should have just called Fury ..._

But she couldn't stop thinking about how he'd asked about Carol. He sounded _desperate._

 _I used a last chance failsafe and came here ..._

And, in fact, she found him a couple of miles away, walking along the road. He crouched and tensed and spun around when her headlights flashed across his armor.

She pulled over, rolled down the passenger-side window, and pointed the gun and flashlight out the window at him. 

"Really?" he said, raising a hand to shield his face from the flashlight's glare.

She hadn't been able to see him as anything other than a dimly glowing figure in the house. Now that she could see a little better, the armor was scarred and scorched. It looked like he'd been through a major fight. And the way he was walking, the way he was _moving_... like he was dragging the armor around with him by brute force.

"Does that thing even work?" she said.

"Does what work?" he asked, lowering his hand a little. She could only glimpse part of his face, with a stark shadow across it. His pale eyes gleamed at her.

"Your suit."

He let out a short, startled bark of a laugh. "What do you care?"

"I don't care, actually. I'm trying to determine how much of a threat to the planet you are."

This time, he actually did laugh. He dropped his arms and faced her square on. The flashlight lit up a face that was bruised and dirty and seared across the right cheek, from the corner of his mouth to his hairline, with a flushed and angry-looking burn scar.

"Whoa. What the hell happened to you?" she said.

"You think I go looking for Vers every other tenday, just for fun?"

If it bothered him having a Glock pointed at his face, he didn't show it. The flashlight's harsh beam turned his face stark white with sharp shadows outlining his features. 

"Her name is Carol," Maria said.

He didn't answer.

"Do you know who I am?" she asked.

"I have no idea."

Maria let out her breath on a shaking, incredulous laugh. Of course he didn't. He hadn't even bothered to find out that much about Carol.

"Why are you here?"

He didn't answer for a moment, and she saw his hands flexing, encased in the armor and hanging down there by his thighs. It occurred to her that even if his suit was too damaged to fly, it clearly still had some power to it. Possibly enough to blast her to kingdom come.

Then he said, "Because I had nowhere else to go."

"Wow. Bullshit."

He shrugged slightly. "I don't care if you believe me or not. I am not your concern. I'm—"

"Oh yeah, right, like I'm just going to let you walk away on _my planet_ to do God only knows what. Get in the car."

"Excuse me?"

"Car. Get in. Door." She pointed to it.

He hesitated, then opened the door after a bit of fumbling. As he got inside, even though she had the gun trained on him, she felt a brief surge of instinctive panic. _This was a mistake._ He was really fucking _big_ in that armor, and horribly close. She had never been this close to a Kree before. There was a faint scorched smell, like burnt electronics or a hot soldering iron. Under the dome light she caught a glimpse of even more denting and scarring on his armor than she had noticed with the flashlight, before he shut the door and the dome light went off.

"I'm in," he said. It sounded challenging, with an unspoken _now what_ at the end.

But he also sounded exhausted, dry-throated, someone run to the end of his strength.

"So what did happen to you, anyway?" she asked. "Are you on the run? Is someone going to come looking for you? Oh fuck, _Monica._ If you led an alien army to my baby, I will _murder_ you, my hand to God—"

"No one is likely to come for me," he said. He leaned his head back against the seat's headrest, and she got a glimpse of how tired he actually was—and how on edge, an instant later, when a semi roared past and he sat forward sharply and brought his hand halfway up, fingers curled and green light igniting on the armor before he sank back again.

He was just about done. She knew the look.

Fuck. Fuck. _Fuck._

"You want something to eat?" she said. "Because I wouldn't mind getting coffee or whatever. I'm sure not going back to bed anytime soon."

***

She took him to Waffle House, because it was the only thing that was open at two in the morning and also because like hell she was taking him to the same house with her little girl in it. In the parking lot, she sat in the car for a moment wondering if it was a good idea to put him in the same building as a bunch of potential victims/hostages, either.

"What is this place?" He was tense, hands lightly curled in their armored gauntlets, and that was what made her realize there was definitely one thing she could do to make the people in that Waffle House a little safer.

"It's a restaurant. You have those back on Hala?" Without giving him time to respond, she went on, "And I'll take you in there and buy you all the waffles you want if you take the armor off."

He was already shaking his head.

"Look, I know you have weapons built into that thing. I'm not calling SHIELD on you, or a military airstrike either, but I might change my mind if you don't disarm when I tell you to."

"I am not going to divest myself of my means of defense."

"You are, or I'm heading for a pay phone and calling SHIELD to stick your murderous ass in a cell and experiment on you. Do you know what we do to aliens on this planet?"

He was silent for a moment, and then he said, his voice tight, "I cannot take it off."

"What, like it's welded to you or something? Bullshit, I've seen Carol take off hers—"

"It is all that's holding me together."

Now it was her turn for a pause. She stared at him in the shadows of the car's interior, under the parking lot lights. He looked bad, but not _that_ bad. Not cut-in-half bad.

"And ... what do you mean by that, exactly?" she said at last.

"There is life-support and wound-sealing technology in the suit. If I take it off, I will probably bleed to death."

"And yet," Maria said, blinking at him, "you're just sittin' there like everything is fine. Talking to me. _Running around._ "

He let out a small sigh. "Yes. The suit allows me to do those things. Without it, I won't be much use to you."

"What use? You're no use to me now! You're a giant armor-plated pain in my ass. I was _asleep_ until you materialized in my living room, and now ..."

She wound down. She had no idea where to go from there. She didn't want to antagonize him enough to blow her head off and at the same time had no idea why she was even _thinking_ about listening to him and not just calling Nick Fury to bury him in the deepest cell that SHIELD had.

 _If nothing else,_ the practical part of her pointed out, _people WILL die if you call in Fury and his MIBs. This guy isn't going quietly if a bunch of armed SHIELD agents show up and start pointing guns at him._

"So, if you can't take it off, how about you disable your weapons," she said. "If you think about it, considering that you tried to attack my planet and personally fucked over my friend, and _especially_ considering that I could get your ass hauled off to alien prison with a single phone call, that is one hell of a minor concession I'm asking for."

He looked at her. And then he slowly reached around with his opposite hand and touched the wrist of his armor. Maria flinched back, reaching for the gun, which she had tucked beside the seat. _This is it, this is how I die. Thank God Monica's back at the house; she's safe, at least—_

The wristpiece of the armor separated from the rest, and the seams kept appearing all the way up to his shoulder. He peeled off the arm piece, and then turned—moving very carefully; she was aware, now, how stiffly and cautiously he moved, like the morning after a really hellacious training day—and took off the other armpiece. He still wore the armor up to the neck, but now his arms were bare.

Underneath, he was wearing a short-sleeved, form-fitting black shirt; the sleeves came halfway down his biceps. She couldn't seen that well, with only the light coming in through the car windows from the brightly lit Waffle House parking lot, but even with his arms half in shadow she could see red marks and indentations from the armor. It looked like he'd been wearing it for a long time.

"As requested," he said. "Good enough?"

Maria took a deep breath. She tried to let go of the adrenaline. She tucked the gun underneath the seat, because she didn't think Waffle House was going to believe that she needed to be armed because she was accompanying a homicidal alien enemy and needed to be ready to stop him from killing people. There was no place to hide it in the pajama pants.

"Let's get some waffles," she said.

***

Under the bright lights of the Waffle House, she got her first clear look at him. He looked like warmed-over shit. She was willing to believe that he was ten kinds of fucked up under that armor. He was nearly gray, with shadows under his eyes as dark as bruises. The burn on his cheek was the only color in his face. He looked thin and hurt and run down to the bone.

She was not even remotely prepared to feel sorry for him, but it was pretty clear that he hadn't been living the high life lately.

It probably said a lot about the midnight Waffle House clientele that nobody seemed terribly nonplused at either of them, a woman in pajama bottoms and a filthy guy in green armor. The waitress gave them a low-key what-the-hell look, but asked no questions, just filled their coffee cups and laid menus in front of them.

Maria whisked Yon-Rogg's away before he had a chance to look at it and told the waitress to bring him an All-Star Special with extra waffles and basically all the meat they had, and a chocolate chip waffle for her, because she had damn well earned it, having to put up with this shit.

The entire time she was braced for him to do something ... well ... evil, like fire up a hidden gun and slaughter everyone in the Waffle House. But he didn't; he just looked around with grim, shadowed eyes. It was a look that reminded Maria too much of Carol when they'd both been on duty for too many days straight, getting no sleep and having to put up with the flyboys' shit besides.

She didn't want to think about that right now. She didn't want to have sympathy for the fucker who had taken everything from Carol.

"So, while we're waiting for our food, I need to go call my baby girl before she calls SHIELD and they drag your ass off to be dissected. Not that I'm leaving that option entirely off the table." She noticed him picking up the cup of coffee and sniffing at it. "That's coffee. Caffeine in liquid form. Do you have caffeine back on your planet? Carol never said. It's a stimulant, in case you don't know." She pointed at the bowl of tiny creamers and the sugar packets. "Cream there. Sugar there. It makes it more palatable. Do _not_ leave this table."

She walked off with a single backward glance, which let her know that he was trying to figure out what to do with the little creamers. Finally he dropped one into his coffee, unopened.

Good for him. Hope he enjoyed unadulterated midnight diner coffee.

She called the house from the pay phone outside the restrooms. Monica picked up on the first ring. "Mom!"

"I'm fine," Maria said quickly. "I'm at Waffle House."

"Without me?" Monica complained. "Unfair."

"I'm at Waffle House with Aunt Carol's ex-alien-CO, so don't get too excited."

"Is _that_ who that guy is?"

"Long story," Maria said. "But there's no need to call out the cavalry—" (yet) "—so why don't you go to bed. Don't wait up for me."

Monica sighed deeply, as only a put-upon teenager can. "The power's still out."

"So that should make it easy to go to bed, then."

"Mom, c'mon. I'm too excited to sleep."

"So read and stay up. I'll be back before morning."

"Can I make cocoa?"

They had a gas stove; it should still work even with the power off. "Yeah, go ahead. See you soon, love bug."

She hung up, gave a moment's thought to just ducking out the emergency exit, and then (metaphorically speaking) pulled up her big girl pants and went back to the table.

Yon-Rogg looked astonishingly out of place at the plastic table, poking at the creamers and soggy sugar packet floundering in his half-drunk coffee. He saw her coming from across the room, and she was uncomfortably aware of him watching her approach, that wary situational awareness that she knew so well.

"That's not how you do it," she said, sitting down. 

He gave her a weary, hostile glare. "Do what?"

She fished the damp packets out of his coffee and tore them open, dumped them in, one by one. "Like that."

He took a cautious sip, then knocked back most of the rest of the cup.

"Wow," Maria muttered. She sipped her own coffee after adulterating it with several creamers. "Either they don't have coffee on Hala, or they do and it's terrible, because I've never seen anyone drink midnight diner coffee like that."

She signaled the waitress for more, and noticed Yon-Rogg tense as the waitress approached their table with a coffeepot. Probably a good idea to minimize the intrusion of civilians into his active surveillance zone, she thought.

"Just leave the pot, would you?" Maria said. "I think we're going to need a lot of it."

The waitress smiled briefly. "Whatever you say, honey."

She set the coffeepot on the edge of the table and left after another curious glance at Yon-Rogg's armor. Maria refilled his cup and topped off her own. Yon-Rogg tore open a sugar packet, sniffed it, licked it, and then began dumping them into his cup.

"Sweet tooth?" Maria said after he had added four.

"Energy," he said. He took a deep drink of the coffee that must have scorched his mouth.

The worst part was, she knew that feeling, when you were so tapped out that you'd eat instant coffee granules by the spoonful just for the cheap buzz. She blew out her cheeks and added another creamer to her own cup. This coffee was really awful. "You'll love the waffles. Okay, it's put up or shut up time. How'd you end up in my living room?"

Yon-Rogg reached for the coffeepot and topped off his cup. Watching him, Maria noticed that his hands were trembling slightly. It was only really evident when he picked things up; he was holding it together with iron self-control. 

He tore open another sugar packet and dumped it in. When there was no plausible way left to stall, he said, "I was seeking Vers."

"Yeah, well, Carol ain't here. I'm what you've got. So talk."

He regarded her briefly with his eerie golden stare and then lifted the cup, curling his left hand around the right to support it. "I am not exactly a popular person on Hala these days."

"Oh no, my heart bleeds."

He gave her a thin, humorless smile. "If it provides you any satisfaction, I returned home from Terra in disgrace after my defeat here. I was punished ... severely, stripped of my rank, and sent to guard a remote outpost on the edge of Kree territory."

"I'm sorry, are you expecting sympathy? Because maybe I'd give it to you if you hadn't wrecked my friend's life and tried to blow up my planet."

Yon-Rogg grimaced. "Without going into details, I ... lost the outpost. We were attacked. I called for backup, but—" He broke off, face tight. "In any case, failure is not tolerated among the Kree. I failed not once but twice. I'm a deserter now. My own people have a bounty on my head."

"Like I said. My heart bleeds." Though it would explain why he looked like he'd been rolled in dirt and starved. She watched him refill his cup of coffee again—moving slowly, allowing for the slight tremor in his hands—followed by tearing open more sugar packets. He was a quick study, and she quietly filed that away for later. He wasn't stupid, and he wasn't slow. "So how did you end up here?" she asked.

"I was captured," he said simply. "I managed to get loose on their ship. There was a transducer on the ship and I ..."

He broke off and refilled his coffee again. This was what, cup number four? The coffeepot was almost empty.

"Drink too much of that and you won't sleep for days," Maria said.

"I am familiar with overuse of stimulants, thanks."

Ah right, _there_ was the arrogant asshole Carol had described. Maria felt her reluctant sympathy batten down again. "So you teleported here, or whatever it was that you did."

Yon-Rogg didn't answer immediately, tearing open more sugar packets. He wasn't going to sleep for a _week._ "I tried to target it to send me to the nearest possible location to Vers, on the general principle that she might kill me, but at least it was less of a sure death than having my molecules spread across the cosmos if I didn't enter _something_ into the coordinate settings." He smiled, a very slight twitch of his mouth. "After everything, I suppose, when I thought of safety, there was some part of me that went straight to Vers. I don't know what that—"

Maria smacked her hand on the table, rattling the silverware. " _Not_ Vers," she snapped, uncomfortably aware that the handful of other patrons and the waitress were now staring at them. She leaned forward, lowering her voice. "Carol. Her name is Carol. If you want my help in any way, you'll call her by the name her mother gave her, the name _she_ chose, not the name you and your bunch pasted on her when you took her hostage and took everything away from her."

Her first sudden movement had made him tense and curl his hands, slopping coffee on the table as he abandoned the cup to half-raise his hands in what was clearly a battle-suit-related threat posture. Without the suit's gauntlets and arm controls, it was almost comical—except she'd seen firsthand how strong he was.

"I didn't ask for your help," he said tightly.

"Oh? You got lots of other places to go, then?" She glanced over her shoulder and saw the waitress looking toward her table, a silent question in those upraised brows, one woman to another: _You okay, hon? He threatening you?_

Maria raised a hand and summoned up what she hoped was a reassuring smile. The waitress went back to wiping down tables.

Yon-Rogg silently wiped coffee off the side of his hand with a crumpled-up handful of sugar packets. She decided not to point out the napkins.

"So what are the chances whoever you escaped from will follow you here? If you've brought danger to my baby, so help me, I will _end_ you."

"No chance at all," he said, and then amended it to, "Very little chance. Ver—Carol's transducer is single-use, and they have no way to lock onto me that I'm aware of."

"They found you once. Are they going to be looking?"

"I won't be here long enough to give them an opportunity," he said.

"So yes, then."

"I don't expect to be followed. If you'd prefer that I leave—"

"That's exactly what I want," she said. "But I feel marginally safer with you where I can keep an eye on you than running around loose and unattended. What's your plan for getting off this world, anyway?"

He didn't answer.

"Yeah, that's what I thought."

They were saved from further conversation by the arrival of their waffles. Maria had to demonstrate the use of forks, but after that he dug in like a man who hadn't eaten in a week. Which, she thought, there was a distinct possibility he hadn't.

***

She took him home. With every mile, she silently kicked herself for not just calling Nick Fury and making this someone else's problem. But she pulled into the driveway before she managed to talk herself out of it.

After turning off the engine, she reached over and grabbed his forearm, realizing only as she felt the jerk and flex of his arm that it was the first time she had touched him.

"My daughter is in the house," she said quietly. "Monica. I won't have you under the same roof with her."

"There is no need to—"

"Oh, shut up. Listen, there's a shed out back where I have a project plane. You can sleep there. I will keep your weapons. You will not enter the house without my permission or I will shoot you. Got it?"

"Yes," he said quietly. He pulled his arm out of her grasp—casually, effortlessly, reminding her once again that these people were engineered killing machines.

Maria retrieved her gun from under the seat, and gathered up the arm pieces to his armor. She didn't offer to give them back. He followed them with his eyes but said nothing, which she distrusted even more than complaints.

She pointed him around the house to the shed, and then went up the steps to the porch. She had forgotten about the broken doorknob until it spun loosely and uselessly in her hand. With a sigh, she keyed open the deadbolt and let herself in. Fixing the door because an alien warlord broke it: another thing for her to-do list.

The power was still out, but it wasn't as dark in the house as she expected. There was a battery-powered lantern on the kitchen table, and Monica sitting beside it, half asleep, head drooping over a book and a half-drunk cup of cocoa at her elbow. There was a blue flame gleaming on the stove and milk scalding over it.

Maria leaped over to turn the fire off. Turning around, she nudged Monica awake. "What are you trying to do, burn the house down?"

"Ugh. Mom! I was making cocoa for you—oh—"

The milk was skinned over and burned down to the bottom of the pan, utterly irretrievable, and the pan might be a loss too. Maria poured it down the sink and filled the pan with water.

"I was waiting for you." Monica stretched past her to look into the living room. "Is he here? The guy? Where did he go?"

"He's out back in the project shed." Sleep was catching up with her. Her eyes felt full of sand despite all the coffee. "I'm going to take him some blankets and then we're going to bed."

"He's sleeping in the _plane?"_

"He's sleeping _with_ the plane. Come on, help me get some things out of the linen closet."

"But," Monica protested, trailing her sleepily. "Why is he sleeping out there?"

"Because he's dangerous."

Monica rubbed her eyes and yawned. "Do you think he wants cocoa?"

"We just had waffles and he drank a pot and a half of coffee, so probably not."

"I could make it," Monica said.

Maria gave up and left her making a new batch by lantern light. She collected blankets from the closet and a spare pillow from the guest bedroom, considered just bypassing Monica and dropping them off outside, but it probably wasn't worth the teenage angst, so she went back to the kitchen. "Give me the cup and I'll take it out to him."

"I was thinking I could carry it?" Monica said hopefully.

"Oh no you fuck—freaking don't."

"Mom, c'mon, your hands are full."

"And he is an alien killing machine." Maria ground her teeth. She recognized that core-deep stubbornness because Monica came by it honestly, and right now Monica wanted to see another alien and wasn't taking no for an answer. "Okay, carry the cocoa. Behind me. Stay _away_ from him, and if I tell you go to back to the house, you do it with no backtalk, got it?"

They left out the back door under a sky spangled with a billion stars. The lights of New Orleans washed out the sky over the trees, but they were far enough out in the country to have clear and brilliant skies for star-watching. Maria led with a bundle of bedcovers tucked under her arm and the gun hidden at the bottom of it. Monica followed, stumbling on the grass and carefully carrying the cocoa in an I HATE MONDAYS Garfield mug.

The project shed was a freestanding roof above a concrete pad, suitable for a climate with no snow and few below-freezing nights. It was pitch dark under the shed roof, but Maria glimpsed movement and then Yon-Rogg's gleaming cat-eyes flashed at her from the darkness.

"It's just us," she said, and there was a soft clank as he put down whatever he'd picked up as a weapon. In retrospect, sending him out to sleep surrounded by all her power tools might not be the best plan. Crickets shirred softly among the trees.

"I brought you cocoa!" Monica said brightly.

"Monica, stay behind me. Yon-Rogg, stay back." Maria stepped up onto the shed's concrete floor. Her eyes were adjusting to the dark; she could see Yon-Rogg as a shadow moving among deeper shadows, with a heavy limping hitch to his movements, and she found herself wondering just how literal, exactly, his _the armor is the only thing holding me together_ comment had been. She dropped her pile of bedding on the concrete. "Here, sleep where you like and do not fucking touch a thing. Monica, put the cocoa on—on the shelf there, I guess."

Soft clinking in the dark. Yon-Rogg moved with such stealth that she had to keep her eyes on him—darker shadow, fading into other shadows—to know where he was. She kept herself interposed between him and Monica.

"Thank you," Yon-Rogg said quietly. "And you, child."

"Do not talk to her. We're leaving now."

They backed away. Maria had to hook her hand into the back of Monica's midi to get her to go.

"Good night, mister!" Monica called out, and as Maria hauled her toward the house, she whispered loudly, "What's his name?"

"You don't need to know what his name is, because he's not staying."

"Mom, c'mon."

"His name is Yon-Rogg," Maria said, and added pitilessly, "And he hurt your Aunt Carol, stole her memories, and murdered her friend and mentor. So don't go near him."

Monica was quiet as they went back into the house. Maria left her in the kitchen and went to check that she had deadbolted the front door behind her. She collected Yon-Rogg's armor pieces and put them in the closet with the damaged transporter. It was as good a place as any for now. Then she went into the kitchen and found Monica cleaning up the cocoa things by the lantern's light.

"Mom," Monica said softly. "If Yon-Rogg is that bad, why are we helping him?"

"Because sometimes you have to help people. It's what's right."

"Even if he's bad."

"Life's complicated," Maria said.

She checked the locks on all the doors a second time, and moved a chair to block the front door for extra security. Not that it would help much. He could easily get in if he wanted to. The locked door hadn't slowed him down in the slightest.

"You're sleeping with me tonight," she told Monica.

"Mom ..."

"Don't Mom me. Call it a sleepover."

Monica let out a deeply put-upon teenage moan, but she followed upstairs. Maria brought the gun with her, closed the door and moved a chair in front of that one, too.

"If we have to go to the bathroom in the night, that's gonna be super annoying, Mom."

"Hush up and get in bed," Maria said, tucking the gun under the mattress on her side where she could easily pull it out.


	2. Maria

She woke to sunlight streaming across her face, bird calls, and Monica tucked up snug and warm against her back.

Carefully she raised her head and inspected the chair in front of the door.

_We're safe._

_So where is he?_

She displaced Monica and sat up.

From the bedroom window, she could see the backyard and the roof of the project shed. Not much was visible underneath the roof from this angle. The grass was jewel-green in the morning sun. Nothing moved.

Maria slipped the gun out from under the mattress, moved the chair, and went downstairs.

The house lay still and quiet in the morning sun. Their cocoa cups were still in the sink, and all the doors remained locked. She checked the closet with Carol's transporter (still inert and half-melted) and twiddled a light switch, confirming that they were still without power.

She was going to have to call the utility company and transfer everything from the refrigerator into coolers if this kept up. _Thanks a lot, Yon-Rogg._

With the gun carried against her thigh, she let herself out into the humid morning. Birdcalls accompanied her across the lawn.

There was no one in the shed, only a crumpled heap of blankets on the concrete floor, and then she glimpsed Yon-Rogg behind the plane, holding a wrench.

"God," Maria muttered. "Come out of there."

He hesitated in a way that was ... not _insolent_ exactly, but clearly intended to give the impression that when he did step out into the open, he was doing it as his choice and not hers. He moved with a hitching limp, carrying himself like his bones hurt.

She saw that he'd taken off more of the armor to sleep. The legs were off from the thighs down, leaving his feet bare. His torso was still encased in it. She wondered if it was as uncomfortable as it looked, and halfway hoped so.

"Your cup is there," he said, nodding to a shelf.

"Uh ... thanks." The cup was empty, with just a crust of cocoa inside. "So what am I supposed to do with you now? Feed you again?"

"You didn't have to feed me in the first place," he said, scraping together a small amount of arrogance. There was something almost pathetic about it at this point; it had a last-ditch desperation to it.

"Sorry, I'm Southern, we're incapable of having people at our house and not giving them food. It's in our genes." He just looked at her, baffled. "That was a joke."

Unsmiling, he sat carefully on a tool chest and laid the wrench down. He was still watching her warily.

Maria sighed and leaned her hip against the plane. "I feel like we need some kind of long-term plan here. You're stuck here, right? Can you fix the transporter?"

"If you mean the transducer, it's unfixable. It's single-use only."

"Great. Do you have a way off this planet?"

"If you happen to have a ship handy ..."

"Sorry," she said. "Just gave away my last one. You can fly in space in that suit, right?"

There was a hesitation before he reluctantly said, "Normally. Not right now. It's damaged."

 _And so are you,_ she thought, looking at the stiff, awkward way he was sitting. "If I help you fix it, will you leave? Is it spaceworthy enough for that?"

"A ship would be better," he said after another brief pause.

"Yeah, well, don't have one. The entire planet doesn't, that I know of. Can that suit get you to somewhere you can get a ship?"

The longest pause of all, and at last he said, "Probably. It's not going to be comfortable, but ..."

"But it'll do it."

He nodded.

"Right," Maria said briskly. "That's a plan, then. We'll fix your suit, and you'll go away and we never have to put up with you again. Sound good?"

Yon-Rogg stared at her with his golden eyes, and then glanced briefly around the clutter of tools and half-dissected engine parts around the plane. "I don't think you have the tools here to fix it."

"How about you don't tell me what I can or can't do. I've been working on machines since I was knee high, and any tools I don't have, I can probably borrow from one of the guys in the local project-plane knitting circle."

"This technology is beyond anything you've ever—"

"Yon-Rogg, if you want my help, shut up."

His jaw clenched. He shut up.

It made her feel infinitely better to have a plan, even if it wasn't a very good one, and a timeline for getting rid of him. Calling SHIELD, she thought, could be held back as a last resort in case he gave her any trouble. "Okay, so we're going to have to take that armor off you to fix it, right? At what point do you anticipate being able to take it off without, er, losing whatever it's doing that's keeping you alive?"

Yon-Rogg shifted on the tool chest he was sitting on, stretching out a leg cautiously. "I assume your medical supplies on this planet are as primitive as the rest of your technology."

"You're incapable of going for two minutes without insulting my planet, aren't you?"

"No insult was intended," he said. "Just stating a fact."

"Yeah, right. Okay, how about I show you what we have for medical supplies, and go from there?"

A pause. He nodded.

"And for that ..." She scowled, but there was really no way around it; he was going to have to come inside to use the bathroom, if nothing else. "Come with me. The kit's in the bathroom, and this'll be easier with running water, I expect. Do not touch _anything_ unless you have to, and do not speak to my daughter."

***

She let them in through the kitchen door. Yon-Rogg looked around quietly, taking it all in with the alert wariness of a soldier patrolling in enemy territory. To Maria's relieved surprise, the refrigerator was humming, so apparently the power was back on. One less thing to worry about. 

Maria shut them into the downstairs bathroom, tucked the gun into the waistband of her pajama pants, and got the first-aid kit and small plastic bins of other first-aid supplies out from under the sink. Ever since Carol had started showing up semi-regularly and often bringing refugees with her, Maria had invested in the best medical supplies that you could get without being a paramedic, along with a small supply of illicit narcotic pain relievers.

Yon-Rogg looked at all of it like she'd given him a handful of moss and told him to pack it on the wound.

"This is what we've got, buddy. Take it or leave it."

He eased himself down awkwardly, with obvious discomfort, to sit on the closed toilet lid. "You can leave now."

"Counterpoint: I'll be more useful at helping to fix your armor if I get a look at how it goes on and comes off. Also, I know how to use everything in this kit. You don't."

She was expecting him to put up more of a fight, but instead he wordlessly began peeling the armor off.

Maria stayed where she was, crouched on the floor with the first-aid kit, and watched. He took off the shoulder and chest pieces first, and then, with a hiss of breath between his teeth, began peeling away the abdominal plates. 

She had forgotten, temporarily, that Kree blood was blue. It was bright as paint, and it was all over the plates of the suit. They were clotted with it, stuck to his blood-soaked and blistered skin.

"Jesus," Maria murmured. She reached up and took a piece of armor from his trembling hand. It was absolutely filthy, slick with blue blood. "Can this get wet? I mean, will washing it damage it?"

"It doesn't matter." His voice was a rasping whisper.

So she moved over to sit on the edge of the tub and rinse off the pieces as he handed them to her. When he got it all off—down to the waist—he leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes briefly. His torso, especially the lower part of it, was a mass of bruises, blisters, and blood, like someone had splashed him with blue paint. His shirt was a total loss; there was barely enough left of it to cover his shoulders.

"What was it doing?" Maria asked. It was partly curiosity, and partly the need to distract him—and herself. "The armor. It has life support capabilities, you said?" She washed her hands and put on a pair of gloves from the kit. No telling if Kree were susceptible to Earth germs, but she didn't want to find out the hard way.

Yon-Rogg drew in a shuddering breath; his prominent ribs flexed under the blood and gore. "It connects directly to the body's own neural network ..." He paused for another pained breath. "... suppresses bleeding and pain, promotes healing."

"Do human painkillers work on you? Or I guess I should put it around the other way, might be easier to answer—would your painkillers work on humans? You'd know because of Carol, right?"

"V—Carol is a Kree," he said without opening his eyes.

Anger shuddered through Maria, tightened her grip on the box of antiseptic wipes in her hand. "Fine, no painkillers it is, then," she murmured, and began sponging at the blood.

He might be a homicidal alien asshole, but he bore it stoically. He barely flinched as she cleaned him up and held rigidly still while she stitched the worst of it. Kree healed faster than humans; she had learned that from Carol. These injuries would probably have killed a human, suit or no suit. It looked like someone had tried to disembowel him, and that was even aside from the burns, which appeared to come from some kind of energy weapon.

"Do you want the suit back on?" she asked, hesitating with a gauze bandage in her hand.

A short headshake. "As you said, the armor must be off to be repaired."

"Right," she muttered, and taped the gauze over the worst of it. The hard part was finding places not bleeding or burnt to tape it to. "Look, your clothes are a wreck, and you also, no offense, could use a sponge bath at the very least. I'll find something clean for you to wear."

She pointed him to the soap and towels, showed him how to use the bath taps, and gave her hands and arms a good scrubbing after peeling off the gloves. The bathroom unavoidably looked like someone had murdered a Smurf in here. He was bleeding a _lot._ She collected the pieces of armor into a clean trash bag.

"What are you doing with that?" he demanded, stirring out of his half-dazed state.

"Taking it outside to clean it properly where there's room to move around. I'm not stealing it," she said, "and I'm not going to damage it. But it's not a large bathroom; there's no need to have it cluttered up with this."

"I demand—"

"Not in my house, you don't."

He started to lurch to his feet, gasped and paled and tried to catch himself on the wall. His hand slid across the tiled shower backstop, leaving a blue smear, and he would have fallen into the space between tub and toilet if she hadn't dropped the bag of armor, lunged forward and caught him. There was an awkward moment when they were half-tussling before she managed to set him on the edge of the tub and stepped quickly back.

He looked up at her, chest heaving as he gasped for air, one hand white-knuckled on the edge of the tub.

"If you fall and break something in here," she said, "you're paying for it."

He just stared at her with those lupine eyes. He was chalk-white, and there was a dark blue streak at the corner of his lips where he'd wiped at his mouth with bloody hands. The burn scar was a purple slash across his pale, bruised face. 

"Why are you helping me?" he whispered as she opened the bathroom door.

"Tell you the truth, I have no goddamn idea," she said, and closed the door on him.

She emerged to the sound of sizzling from the kitchen and rich frying smells. "Power's back on, Mom!" Monica called.

"I know." Maria poked her head into the kitchen, where Monica was intently hovering with a spatula over a pan of breakfast sausage. "Hon, could you run over to the—hmm—" Which of the neighboring households had someone about Yon-Rogg's size, she mused. He was bulky, even in his underfed state. Nothing of hers would come close to fitting him. "—the Bergers', and see if you can borrow some of Lloyd's clothes; sweatpants and loose shirts would be best. Tell them we got a family friend staying with us and the airline lost his luggage."

Monica looked excited and terrified at the same time. "Is he staying for breakfast?"

"He's not eating with us, if that's what you mean, and I _don't_ want you talking to him. Go!"

Monica rolled her eyes, but scampered off. "Don't let that burn!" she called back.

"I know how to cook in my own kitchen, thank you!"

She put the bag of armor on the porch, washed her hands again, and then decided maybe she ought to change out of her blood-stained pajama pants. The sausage did burn, but not badly. By the time Monica came jogging back with a satchel, the sound of running water in the bathroom had stopped, and Maria was scraping scrambled eggs onto three plates.

"They also sent a pie!" Monica declared, plopping it on the table. "It's peach."

Of course they did. She turned the job of making toast over to Monica and opened the satchel in the living room. The clothes looked roughly the right size. She opened the bathroom door a crack and shoved the bundle in.

"There's food when you're done," she said, and shut the door on him again.

"So what is going on here exactly, Mom?" Monica asked, diligently buttering toast when Maria came back into the kitchen. "Is he a prisoner or a guest or what?"

"I wish I knew. I want you to keep your distance." She was reasonably confident at this point that Yon-Rogg was unlikely to take Monica as a hostage or otherwise upend their precarious hospitality—he needed them, they didn't need him, and he knew it. But people who felt threatened could do unwise things. And she knew he didn't trust her either, and he had to know she was one phone call away from SHIELD.

"Are we going to try to call Aunt Carol?"

"I wish." She had no way of getting in touch with Carol directly; she would have to go through SHIELD. The transporter had been it. She was now thinking that they needed a backup means of communication. She would need to talk to Carol about that when they saw each other next ... whenever that was.

The bathroom door opened, and Yon-Rogg slouched cautiously into the kitchen, moving with great care and dressed in ill-fitting sweat pants and an LSU sweatshirt that was too big. Monica froze in the act of putting more bread in the toaster and stared at him like a rabbit in headlights.

Maria stepped between them and scooped up a plate off the table. "Yours," she said, shoving it into his hands. "You'll eat on the porch. Oh wait, here." She had placed a couple of small white pills beside it on the table, which she dropped on the edge of the plate. "I figure it's not a good idea to try you on anything stronger, but over-the-counter Earth painkillers aren't going to kill you. Probably."

He looked at the plate and at her. His gaze, alert and wary, skipped to Monica, but Maria sidestepped to keep herself in the way, the message clear. After a moment, he said quietly, "Thank you," and let himself out onto the back porch.

"So that's him," Monica said in a loud whisper as the door closed behind him. "He doesn't _look_ like a crazed killer."

"You're an expert on the general appearance of crazed killers?"

"I thought maybe he'd look like the Unabomber or something. What happened to his face?" 

"Eat," Maria ordered, pulling out a chair.

It was a school morning, so they were at the table for all of two minutes before Maria finally thought to check the time and then sent Monica upstairs to get her books, with a toast-wrapped sausage sandwich in her hand.

"Mom!" Monica called from the top of the stairs, backpack in hand. "Keys!"

Maria found the keys, eventually, in the bedroom; she had been too rattled last night to put them in their usual place in the hall entrance. "Drive careful. Come back home straight—" She stopped in the middle of her usual set of admonishments, a standard litany since Monica had gotten her license and started driving herself to school. "Actually, no, if you want to hang out with your friends after school, that's totally fine. In fact, you might spend the night at Heather's. I can call her mom and make sure it's all right."

"Where is my mother and what have you done with her?" Monica kissed her cheek. "No, I have soccer practice but I'll come back home right after. I don't want to leave you alone with him."

"I want you safe, honey."

"I want you safe too," Monica protested.

"And you want to get a better look at the alien."

Monica rolled her eyes, but broken into a cheeky grin. "Talos and Soren were awesome. I like hanging out with aliens."

"This one's not awesome, and you're not hanging out with him. Get off to school, and call me from Heather's if you change your mind."

"Now that's more like the mom I know," Monica said cheerfully. She slung the backpack over her shoulder, and a minute later announced, "Mom! There's something wrong with the doorknob!"

"I know. The alien you want to make friends with did that. The door still opens, it just doesn't stay shut. Get on out of here, you're gonna be late. But don't break the speed limit!" she called down from the porch as Monica galloped over to the car. "Drive careful! Be safe!"

Maria watched her drive off, just missing the mailbox, and sent a little prayer to whatever saint looked after teenagers with newly minted driver's licenses. 

She threw the deadbolt and went back into the kitchen to clean up. There was a brief brownout while she scraped plates into the garbage disposal. The refrigerator shut off abruptly and the microwave clock, which she had just painstakingly reset to the current time, flicked off and came back with its blinking 12:00 display.

"Really?" she muttered. "There better not be something permanently shorted out in the wiring, dipshit."

She scrubbed down the bathroom, which unsurprisingly he had left looking like a Care Bear crime scene, and did the dishes, and then, because she couldn't ignore him forever, got the gun again and unlocked the kitchen door. 

Yon-Rogg was sitting on the back porch with the armor spread out around him, empty plate beside him, elbows resting on his knees and his head in his hands. He jerked up at her approach, one hand twitching toward the armor and then dropping away.

"Monica is off to school," Maria said. 

"I'm not going to hurt your child."

"I'm sure you've hurt plenty of children," she said matter-of-factly. "I'm going to get the hose and we'll see about scrubbing that stuff down so you can fix it and get out of my life."

She uncoiled the hose and dragged it around, then went back into the house for scrub brushes and other cleaning supplies.

It was oddly companionable, sitting on the back porch with the armor between them as the day warmed. The weather was starting to calm down from the summer's punishing heat but had not yet achieved daytime temperatures that might be called properly cool. Sweat dampened the back of her neck.

She kept the gun in easy reach on her side of the porch, aware that it was a risk—she'd noticed him eyeing it—but she felt better with it than without. She filled a bucket with sudsy water so they could soak filth out of the fabric parts of the armor. It was a sort of a tough, heavy mesh, connected to the harder plates in a seamless way that seemed to grow out of them.

"Are you sure we aren't going to damage it?" she said.

Yon-Rogg shook his head. "It's meant to stand up to far more severe punishment than this."

"But not, say, lasers," she murmured, tilting a warped armor plate to scrub at the scorch marks.

"That's a pulse rifle blast that didn't cut me in half, so yes, those also."

"Who were you fighting with?"

She wasn't expecting an answer, but he said, "A bunch of Rydri bounty hunters. Mercenaries and thieves. General lowlives."

"I'm sure you did nothing to antagonize them."

"Appeared in their quadrant of space with a bounty on my head," he muttered, bending forward to carefully scrub out a joint in the armor. "A mistake I now regret, trust me."

"And you say there's no way they can possibly follow you here. Sure about that?"

"Yes," he said. "The device you have here is single-use. There's a critical component that melts when it's used, to prevent exactly the situation you're worried about. It's untraceable."

"You better be right."

"What's the matter?" he asked dryly. "Don't trust me?"

"Was that a joke? Yeah, don't try for a sense of humor. It's not your best feature."

After a moment, he said, "You remind me of her."

"Who? Carol? Given what you did to her," Maria said without looking up, "I don't know how to take that."

But she was curious. He had known Carol in a way that Maria never had: as a Kree. And as much as Maria would like to convince herself that there was nothing of Vers in Carol, by now she had realized that it wasn't true. Carol was still Carol, but at the same time, she _wasn't_ quite the same as the woman Maria had known so well. She had come back from space different. And ... of _course_ she had, there was no way that going through something like that wouldn't change a person, but it also meant that there was a big chunk of Carol's life, a very formative part of it, that Maria hadn't been there for and knew almost nothing about.

"It wasn't meant as an insult," Yon-Rogg said.

Of course he _would_ think she thought that. 

"Don't," she said. "This—whatever you're doing here. Stop. We're not friends and we're not going to be. I'm trying to get your obnoxious alien ass off my porch and back to space where you belong. And," she added, "I've spent enough time scrubbing your armor. I have work to do."

She picked up the gun and went into the house.

***

Since leaving the Air Force, she had worked as a veterans' counselor and on-call emergency contact. She went into the New Orleans office two days a week and the rest of the time worked from home. She had an office upstairs in the small bedroom adjacent to Monica's, the window of which gave her a panoramic view of the backyard. Today, she was working on paperwork, with the dispatch radio by her elbow in case she was needed.

When Monica was younger, the flexible hours and ability to work from home had been a godsend, especially compared to being a single mom on active duty. But these days it gave her a lot of time to think. Too much time, maybe. She couldn't concentrate on paperwork today; instead she leaned back in her chair and kicked a foot up on the desk and studied Fury's card. It was almost entirely blank; it just said SHIELD INSURANCE in small gold letters, with a number that had a prefix she'd had to look up to learn was New York.

Help was just a phone call away.

And all that went along with it. She had spent too much of her life dealing with the grinding wheels of government bureaucracy to trust an organization that was the very definition of the proverbial Men in Black.

On top of that, the power picked just then to fritz out again, browning out and coming back. She looked up at the ceiling warily. Their power was always a little unpredictable, living on a country road as they did, but she was even more worried now that there was some kind of short from the power surge last night.

"Damn it," she muttered, and swung her legs down. She felt as if she was living minute-to-minute, second-guessing herself at every turn. "Why couldn't you have picked someone else's living room to turn up in? Asshole."

But eventually she took the portable battery-powered radio, put on the Glock in a clip-on holster, and went downstairs. She sometimes worked out in the airplane workshop during an on-call shift. And she didn't like leaving him unmonitored for this long.

She had forgotten about the front door, _again,_ until she tried to open it using the knob, only to have it spin uselessly in her hand.

 _Crap. I could've had Monica buy a new doorknob, if I'd thought of it._ She went down to one knee and tried to see what was wrong. It looked like it wasn't latching right. Something had snapped inside.

Actually ...

She left the front door half open and went out into the heat and humidity of early afternoon.

Yon-Rogg was back in the airplane shed. The blankets had been neatly folded and the armor was spread out on the edge of the concrete pad. He was looking through her tools.

"Did I give you permission to do that?"

He looked over his shoulder without jumping; he had known she was there. "If this is all you have to work with, this is going to take even longer than I feared."

"Thanks," she said, folding her arms. 

"I'm going to need the rest of my armor back." He flexed a hand, demonstrating. "The arm pieces. There are valuable diagnostic tools that I need. I can't do this without them."

"And weapons."

"The armor is almost out of power. Most of it doesn't work."

She eyed him warily. "You didn't tell me that last night."

"You were holding a weapon on me last night."

Hmm. True. "Look, how about this. You do a job for me, and I'll think about giving your arm things back."

"You want me to work for you?" He sounded incredulous.

"Yeah, you're eating my food and sleeping in my shed, you think rent is free? You broke my front doorknob. You fix it. And then I'll get out my tools and shit, and work on your armor."

He stared at her for a long, silent moment. He still looked like shit, she thought, sleepless and gray, his hair plastered with sweat in the humidity. She wondered if Hala was a cold world. Carol had never said.

Then he nodded briefly.

She grabbed a handful of screwdrivers and led the way.

***

She actually did most of it, but it was the principle of the thing. She had never installed a doorknob before, or taken one apart either, but it was pretty obvious where to unscrew. Once she had it in pieces, she could see that one of the pieces had sheared off so the latch no longer latched. 

And he'd just done that with his bare hand. Well ... his armor-enhanced hand. She couldn't have broken a solid bar of metal with both hands if she'd tried with all her might, even poor-quality doorknob metal.

"I don't know how to fix this," Maria said, holding the sheared-off piece in her palm. "We might be able to weld it, but it's probably much simpler to just get a new one."

"Bring me the rest of my armor and I'll fix it for you," Yon-Rogg said. He was sitting in the doorway with his back against the frame, watching her. He had made no effort to come any farther into the house.

"If this is a trick, so help me ..." she muttered, but she got up, and went and got the arm pieces of his armor out of the closet. He was still sitting in the doorway when she got back.

"Okay," she said, standing over him. "Ground rules. You wear these only when they're necessary, all right? I'm giving them to you to use for repair, not weapons. If I have reason to think you'll misuse them—"

"—You'll take them away," he said, looking up at her with a slight, sardonic smile and a glimmer of golden eyes set in shadows as deep as bruises.

"No, I'll take a big-ass sledgehammer and pound them into scrap." And she held them out.

Some of the tension went out of his body as soon as he had his hands on the armor pieces again. He laid one of them against his right arm, and Maria jumped as it moved on its own, slotting neatly into place from shoulder to wrist and closing over the palm of his hand. Then he followed with the other.

Maria took a quick step back and rested her hand on the butt of the gun. Yon-Rogg flexed his hands and looked up at her. There was a long, tense moment when it felt like a standoff. Even with just the arm pieces in place, there was something more confident about him, a kind of casual assurance that she instantly distrusted.

He reached forward. She drew the gun half out of its holster. But all he did was pick up the broken doorknob. Maria hesitated and then moved closer. She wanted to see.

Even expecting something of the sort, she wasn't quite prepared for the brilliant green beam of light that stabbed out of the cuff and seared the broken latch, welding it together again.

It was over in an instant. He turned the half-knob carefully; the latch went in and out. He handed it back to her.

"Huh," she muttered, taking it from him. She tested the latch with the tip of her finger. It was slightly warm to the touch, but not hot, and seemed completely solid.

"Suitable for upholding my end of the deal?" he asked, looking up at her as she began screwing the knob back into place.

"Yeah, I guess so." But she didn't like that confidence. She had liked him better off balance.

***

They worked on the armor in the shade of the workshed. On the whole, Maria worked on straightening it and getting dents out, while Yon-Rogg did the finer bits of what she guessed was some kind of high-tech soldering. 

By midafternoon he was visibly flagging, pale and shivering despite the heat. He didn't say anything, but after he'd dropped a couple of tools, Maria was the one who called a break. She went back to the house to get something to drink, and came back with lemonade and two slices of peach pie and a handful of ibuprofen.

"Don't get used to the room service," she said. "How close do you think this is to fixed?"

He just shook his head wordlessly. When she had called a break, he'd all but collapsed, and he seemed to need a moment to stir himself enough to take the pills she'd given him with a swallow of lemonade.

"If you rupture something and die out here, it's going to be awkward to explain to emergency services."

He didn't say anything, and she sat down at the opposite end of the shed and ate. After a little while, he reached for the plate, took a couple of bites and then put it down again and leaned his head back against the support pole he was using for a backrest.

"So what was she like?" Maria asked abruptly, chasing a piece of crust around her plate with her fork. "Carol. When you knew her."

Yon-Rogg raised his head and regarded her from his deeply shadowed eyes.

"Ferocious," he said. "She was ferocious. There was something in her that was—indomitable. I had never seen anything like it." He hesitated, then added, "And curious. She wanted to know everything, how it all worked, every unfamiliar piece of technology, every bit of Kree culture. Of course," he went on thoughtfully, "she thought she was learning it all again."

Maria hadn't expected an honest response, especially that honest. The last piece of pie crust stuck in her throat.

_She was like a dry sponge for you, that curious mind and intense yearning to be more and go farther ... and you filled her up with what YOU wanted, made her what you wanted her to be—_

Except it hadn't worked in the end, had it? In the end, Carol had done exactly what she had done on Earth. She had become what she was going to be, regardless of what anyone else tried to get her to do.

"I hope she was an enormous pain in your ass," she said.

"Oh, she was," he said with a smile that was _fond,_ God help him; Maria wanted to punch it off his face. "She was."

Her hand curled convulsively around her fork handle until the edges dug into the skin. "I wish she'd fucked your shit up even more than she did. Honest to God, not gonna lie here, I wish she'd killed you."

She was trying to make it hurt, she realized as the words left her mouth. But if any of it struck home, it didn't show. He just looked tired. 

"I've been exiled, I'm on the run, and my own people want me dead," he said. "For a Kree, I might as well be dead at this point. It's essentially the same thing."

"If that's really how you feel, I can call SHIELD and they can help you with that."

"You mentioned that before," he said. "What's SHIELD?"

"They're the people whose job it is to deal with people like you."

"Go ahead." But, although he didn't move, his gaze flicked briefly to the gun clipped to her waistband, and Maria again had the same tense, standoff feeling she'd gotten when she gave the rest of his armor to him back at the house. For a moment they were balanced on a razor's edge; it felt as if one wrong move could unravel whatever kind of fragile truce they were operating under.

As weak, tired, and hurt as he was, she still wasn't sure if she could win against him if he had the armor.

She was the first to move. She left the gun in its holster, got up and collected her plate. Yon-Rogg followed her with his eyes and didn't otherwise move. "Going to call your SHIELD?" he asked. One hand twitched toward the gauntlets.

The thing about it was, though—the moment had passed. It was not as much like combat, she thought, as it was like a bar fight ... which Carol had regularly dragged her into. There was a moment just before every bar fight when either person could have walked away, or backed a step down, or otherwise defused it. And it didn't even take much. It just took ... well, picking up a pie plate instead of a gun.

The other person could still attack. But what she had learned from those long-ago bar fights was that most people wouldn't go the extra distance, small though it might be, to take the fight to someone who wasn't the aggressor anymore.

And what she had learned about herself today, or perhaps relearned, is that she didn't want to be the aggressor in a fight like that. _Carol_ picked fights. Maria was the defensive fighter, the backup.

As for an alien who had spent his life conquering worlds ... she didn't know. She didn't know anything about what he was capable of.

"If you need anything else from the house, let me know, because otherwise I'm going back to work," she told him.

He stared up at her like he didn't understand her at all. Which was, she thought, probably true.

She walked back to the house with a nervous itch between her shoulder blades, all too aware that he might still have enough of a charge on those gauntlets to shoot her. She didn't turn around, and she didn't stop, but once she was back inside she threw the deadbolt and leaned on the table and breathed deeply until her legs stopped shaking.

***

Sunset was throwing long shadows when gravel crunched in the driveway, and moments later Monica charged up the stairs.

"Is there still an alien, Mom? Did I miss him? Did he leave? Did Aunt Carol call?"

"There is still an alien. Go wash your hands and help me with dinner."

This turned out to be a process complicated by Monica's desperate curiosity, and while they cut up vegetables and rolled chicken cutlets in bread crumbs, Maria told her the entire story of everything that had happened last night, plus a very heavily expurgated version of how Yon-Rogg was connected to Carol.

"We're going to take him dinner, right Mom? I can do that now—"

"No, first you eat your dinner and _then_ we take a plate out to the alien warlord currently living in our backyard. Pass the butter, please."

"Man, Aunt Carol is going to _flip out_ when we tell her about this," Monica said, reaching for the butter dish.

Yeah, she probably was, and not necessarily in a good way. Which, Maria thought with discomfort as she smeared butter onto a roll, might also be factoring into her own decision not to bring SHIELD in on it. It would mean having to justify why she had made the choices she'd made and ... well ...

Sometimes it was better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission. That was the Carol way.

Except begging wasn't the right word. Begging was not a Carol thing. It was more like, you could deliberately fail to ask permission and do the thing anyway and ask the powers-that-be what they were going to do about it afterwards.

"What's funny, Mom?" Monica asked.

"Nothing. Just remembering some things I got up to with your Aunt Carol, that's all."

And also thinking about how _much_ of an enormous steel-plated pain in the ass Carol must have been for Yon-Rogg on Hala. No matter how hard he had tried to brainwash her into being a nice, obedient Kree soldier, Maria could only imagine that she had run rings around him at every turn. It was very satisfying to think about.

And yet, he'd stuck with her. Not that he'd had much of a choice, not with Carol having the core energy inside her. Yon-Rogg had taken her back to Hala; he'd been responsible for her, and he was almost certainly under orders to that effect. It wasn't like he could have dropped her if he'd wanted to.

But still, however involuntary it had been, however responsible he had been for her condition ... Maria kept thinking about that incongruous fondness when he talked about her. Carol was the exact opposite of an obedient Kree soldier. She always had been. Maria couldn't imagine she had been any different on Hala. However hard he had fought to mold her into a perfect Kree soldier, however he had manipulated her to achieve that end, she must have been a constant source of annoyance and frustration. 

And still, there was that fondness. Maria didn't know how to make peace with it. 

***

She insisted on getting done with the washing-up afterwards, and only then, when there was no further reason to put it off, she allowed Monica to load up a plate under her supervision, and they took it out the back door.

Light shone across the grass from the airplane shed, and even from the back porch, Maria could hear the hiss and crackle of Yon-Rogg working on his armor, the sharp ring of metal and then a silence as they approached. 

He was sitting on the edge of the concrete pad with a sledgehammer. He laid it aside as they came closer—Maria couldn't help noticing how he handled the twenty-pound sledge like it weighed nothing, holding it just behind the head—and got up carefully, moving like his entire body was brittle.

"We brought food!" Monica said.

"And more painkillers," Maria said. She laid those and a large water bottle on the edge of the concrete slab. "They're also anti-inflammatories, which is good for healing for reasons that I have no idea. They don't seem to be killing you, so keep taking 'em."

He nodded slightly. "Thank you."

"So you're from space," Monica said, and his pale gaze swung to her. Maria sidestepped to block them. "Hey!" Monica said.

"We're going into the house to watch movies," Maria said. "Come in and clean up afterwards if you want to. You can use the downstairs bathroom. And then go back out. All right?"

A long silence. His lupine eyes seemed to have their own light, watching her. And then he said, "All right."

***

And that set the tone for the next couple of days. 

It was a strange, tense kind of truce. He lived in the airplane shed. She brought him food and came out to help him work on the armor when she had a chance, showing him how to use her various tools.

He was quiet, polite, and did what he was told. She didn't trust it for a minute.

He was right, though, that they didn't have the tools to properly fix the armor. She was already out of her depth when it came to working on electronics—she was far more comfortable with strictly mechanical repairs—and this was far beyond anything she'd seen or heard of. She didn't even have the tools to diagnose the armor's problems, let alone to fix it.

At least Monica was busy as only a sixteen- going on seventeen-year-old could be, which kept her away from the house most of the time. Maria was halfway dreading the weekend, because she was going to have to either spend Saturday and Sunday deflecting Monica's curiosity, or just break down and let the kid hang out in the workshed with them.

Hell. It wasn't like Monica was any safer in the house, if he got into his head to try to take them hostage or just take off. 

_I wish I could talk to Carol about this._

He was, she noticed, already moving less stiffly, without that curled-over, pained body language. She knew that Kree healed faster than humans; Kree were stronger and swifter. She wanted him out of their lives before he was back up to a hundred percent.

On Friday evening, Monica was out until after dark at band practice. Maria stuck a frozen pizza in the oven and took half of it out to Yon-Rogg. 

"How close to done do you think you are?" she asked, leaning down to examine the armor spread out on the concrete floor of the shed. It was shinier, less dinged and scorched.

"Getting there." He reached for a slice of pizza. "What is this?" he said through a mouthful.

"Pizza."

"Your world seems to specialize in foods laden in sugars and fats and fried items."

"That's what you get for landing in the South. You want salads, go to Seattle next time."

He smiled, a brief, slight twist of his mouth. "Do you know, I know the name of your city and your region and your country, and even your child, but not yours."

"You're kidding," Maria said. She sat down on the edge of the concrete pad, and laughed; she couldn't help it. "I really never told you, did I? I just thought you knew."

"How would I know?"

How would he, indeed. That sobered her. He had only ever known Carol as Vers, for all those years—Vers, who didn't remember Maria, who didn't remember Earth. And if Carol had ever mentioned Maria during Yon-Rogg's brief interactions with her when she was no longer Vers, he probably hadn't paid enough attention to retain it.

She didn't actually have to tell him. She could just let him go back out to space, not knowing.

"It's Maria," she said.

Headlights raked across the mailbox and the grass. Monica was back. Maria got to her feet, brushing off dust and grass clippings.

"Leave the plate when you're done," she said, and crossed the lawn, not looking back, as Monica parked by the fence with near-adult precision.

Maria went to give her a quick hug. Monica leaned in for a moment, like the little kid she used to be, and then pulled away. "How's alien shop class?" Monica asked.

"Complicated. There's pizza."

Monica laughed. "Do aliens like pizza?"

"It was hard to tell."

The phone was ringing when they walked through the door. Maria pointed Monica toward the cordless; she had to get plates down for the pizza.

"Mom?" Monica called from the open doorway into the kitchen. "It's Rudy, I think?"

Maria reached for the phone with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. A work call in the evening wasn't that unusual, but it was almost never good news.

"Maria, if I had anyone else to call in—" were the first words out of her supervisor's mouth. Also not a good sign.

"I'm not on night call this week, Rudy." She wordlessly pointed Monica at the plates and the pizza. 

"I know that, but Danielle's still on maternity leave and Katie has the flu, and we've got a bad situation at the shelter. Gas leak, two dozen people displaced—"

"Seriously, Rudy, it's not a good time."

"—and we've got a guy freaking out right now, absolute meltdown, and don't have anyone to calm him down. You're _good_ at that."

"Rudy—"

"—look, trust me, I wouldn't call you if I had any choice. I can't drop this into the lap of the volunteers without an experienced person on scene. They're just kids."

Maria huffed out a breath. "Look, I just sat down to feed _my_ kid, okay? Just—hold on for a minute—"

She covered the receiver with her hand. Monica looked up from loading a plate with pizza.

"You gotta go in, Mom?"

"I'm afraid so." _If I had anyone else to call in_ rang in her ears. Still, her gaze was drawn to the dusk outside the window, where light gleamed out of the airplane shed and threw shadows like black bars on the grass. 

Monica's face fell a little, but she squared her shoulders. "Okay."

"Maria, I'm sorry, I have to go," Rudy's tinny voice said in her ear. "I can't stay on the phone. It's crazy here. Look, an hour, just give me an hour or two of your time, we really gotta get this guy settled down and the kids aren't going to be able to handle it—"

"I'll be there as soon as I can," Maria told Rudy, and she hung up with a wrenching feeling in her chest, as if she was being torn in half.


	3. Monica

"I hate leaving you like this."

Monica hung on the office doorframe, watching her mother stuff a few things in a bag while she shoved half a slice of pizza in her mouth. "I'll be fine, Mom," she said around a mouthful of cheese and meat. Ow. Hot. "Seriously."

"Stay in the house with the doors locked," Mom said, turning around from packing her go bag. "I mean, if we get lucky, I'll get everything squared away in an hour and be back before bedtime."

"Yeah, that's totally true," Monica said, nodding, and knowing for sure that it wasn't going to be. It never was. She wouldn't trade her mom for anything, but there were still times when she kinda wished she had a mom like Heather's who worked a normal nine to five job and never had to run off in the evenings to talk down a jumper or coordinate a flood response.

Maria stopped to pull Monica into a tight hug. "What if I drop you off at Heather's house on the way to the shelter? You could have a sleepover."

Monica shook her head. "They're in Missouri this weekend at her cousin's wedding. It's okay, Mom. I'll be fine here."

"You know I don't like taking you on calls with me, but maybe this once—"

"Oh, ugh. No. _Please."_ She had had to go along just often enough to know all the various ways that it was going to be miserable. There would be lots of tragic people around, or yelling people, and nothing for her to do, and probably she would end up stuck in the office and bored, being ignored by the adults and not being allowed near any of the interesting stuff because she was only sixteen. 

Mom scruffed her hair like she was ten. "Okay then, but if you feel uncomfortable or scared at all, call Heath—no—Lindsey or Lecia's mom and have them pick you up and take you over there, okay?"

"Okay." Monica didn't go ahead and remind her mom that Lindsey had a single dad and Lecia's parents were gone for work as much as Mom was. It made Mom feel better about leaving her home, and she really would rather be here than there.

"And you've got the shelter number if you need to call? And—" Mom glanced at the window. "—you know where the SHIELD card is if anything goes wrong here, right?"

"Yes, Mom, I'm fine. I've done this before," Monica pointed out.

But the doubts began to creep in after her mother closed and locked the front door, leaving her alone in a house that felt suddenly too big and too empty.

She ran upstairs and, from the window of Mom's office, watched Mom having a brief but vehement discussion out by the airplane shed with Yon-Rogg. Mom was doing all the talking. He raised his hands and walked back under the roof, and Mom walked off swiftly toward the driveway. Monica ran to another window, and watched her drive away until the taillights had vanished from sight.

"It's okay," she said aloud to herself. "He never comes in anyway. He'll stay out there, and if he doesn't, Mom will kick his butt back to Mars or Kree or wherever."

She ran around the house checking all the locks, and peered out the window in the back door toward the workshop area. There was a light on out there, but she couldn't see what Yon-Rogg was doing, just an occasional hint of a shadow moving around.

"I can't stare at him all night, that's just weird," she muttered to herself. She went into the rec room, popped a tape into the VCR, and flopped on the couch. Then she hopped up and ran back to the kitchen, looked out again—still nothing—and got another piece of pizza and a pint of ice cream from the freezer. It wasn't the first time Mom had had to leave her by herself overnight, and they had an informal understanding that if she had to make food for herself and cleaned up the kitchen, no awkward questions would be asked about what, exactly, she'd eaten.

"Mom will never know," she muttered, got a spoon, and took a final look out the window before she went back to the movie.

As she sprawled on the couch, munching Rocky Road, it occurred to her that there were a lot of things Mom would never know. Like, for example, if she went into the backyard for a while. Just to watch a little bit. She didn't have to actually _talk_ to him.

"No, no, no," she said aloud, talking to Tom Hanks on the TV screen. "Mom trusts me. She told me to stay in the house and I'm gonna stay. She could've made me come along, but she let me stay here because she knows I can be trusted to take care of myself and do the smart thing."

And the smart thing was to stay in the house and not poke the mysterious, dangerous alien.

She kept looking over at the closed closet door, with the broken alien thing behind it. The movie passed in a blur. She noticed it had reached the credits only when it hit the end of the tape and kicked over into automatic rewind. The ice cream was down to a little bit of melted glop in the bottom of the carton.

_I wonder if Kree have ice cream. Maybe he'd like it._

There was homework to do, but she knew she wouldn't be able to concentrate. It was the weekend anyway; she had until Sunday night.

Instead she went to the closet and opened the door to look at the melted silver-white loop of the transporter.

Mom didn't know this, but she used to come downstairs sometimes at night, under the pretext of getting a drink of water in case she got caught, just to look at it. It was magical and wonderful, and she hoped it would do something wondrous someday.

Mom kept telling her that it wasn't so magical out there in space. There were wars and injustice just like on Earth, and Mom and Aunt Carol had had to fight for their lives, and although Mom had never really said so, Monica knew that she had barely made it back. Aunt Carol was still out there fighting. And people like Yon-Rogg were why she was having to fight.

"But it's still cool," she whispered, reaching out lightly to brush the smooth not-metal with her fingertips. It had a slick, greasy feeling.

The lights flickered and she jumped. For a shocking instant she thought her touch had fixed it, activated it somehow. Then she laughed to herself. It wasn't the transporter doing anything; it was only the wonky wiring again. She closed the closet door as the lights dipped and stabilized.

Then she almost jumped out of her skin when the phone rang.

"Hi baby," Mom said on the other end. There was so much noise in the background that Monica could hardly hear her. "How are things there?"

"Fine." She took the cordless over to the window, but there was nothing to see out there but the dark trees and the light still gleaming behind the plane, casting its long shadow across the yard. "The doors are still locked and he's out there I guess, but everything's okay. I was just watching _Big._ "

"Good for you, baby—no, ma'am, ma'am, listen to me," Mom interrupted to say to someone on her end of the line. "Pet rats are fine but they have to _stay in their cage._ —Listen, sweetie, I'm going to try to get away as soon as I can."

"But it's going to be later than you thought." Monica couldn't help imagining a woman with rats crawling all over her. It would be fun to have a pet rat. But probably not at a shelter.

"I might be out past bedtime. Are you _sure_ you're okay there?"

"Absolutely. I watched a movie and made myself a snack. Well-balanced and everything." Technically Rocky Road had at least two food groups if you counted the nuts.

"I'm on the phone! Carmen! Can you help the lady with her rats, please? Give her the cot—uh, as far as possible from the guy with the cats. What were you saying, sweetheart?"

Monica tried not to either sigh or giggle. "Just that I'm fine here, Mom. Really. You can stay as late as you have to."

"Oh, baby, you know what I just remembered? Could you put the laundry in the machine? It's really piling up; I haven't had time. You don't have to separate. Just wash everything on cold— _Not there, Carmen!_ — and if you forget to switch it over to the dryer or have to go to bed, it's okay, it'll be fine in the washing machine overnight—no, sir, that needs to go back in its carrier _right now_ —"

"Will do, Mom," Monica said when she could get a word in. "Love you."

"Love you too. Sorry, I have to go."

The phone hung up with a click in the middle of Mom saying something to someone else about catching cats. Or rats. It was hard to say. Maybe both.

Poor Mom, she thought, and then stood with the phone in her hand for a minute, feeling a little bit sad and lonely and left out.

But at least she had something to do. She hung up the phone and ran upstairs to get the laundry hamper.

Mom was right, it was overflowing. Monica wrinkled her nose and stuffed as many things as she could fit into the washing machine. 

"What is this, paint?" she muttered, holding up Mom's rumpled pajama bottoms, covered in dark blue stains. Could that be washed with the rest, or would it stain everything? She sniffed one of the stains. It didn't really have a smell. Then she almost dropped the pajamas when she realized what it was. "Oh, ewww. Eww, ick, that's _blood."_ Aunt Carol bled blue, so Yon-Rogg probably did too. "What do I _do_ with this? Ugh."

She stuffed it down in the hamper for Mom to deal with, put soap in the machine, and turned it on.

There was a series of pops and all the lights went out.

Monica stood in the dark with her hand on the knob and panic flooding her.

_What did I do, did I break something, Mom is never going to leave me home alone again ..._

Her first, desperate thought was CALL MOM. Then she got herself under control. It was just a power outage. Maybe a neighborhood blackout, but probably a blown fuse. They used to have an old stove that blew the breakers all the time. She was terrified of doing anything with the breaker box herself because _violent electrical death,_ but Mom had reassured her that it was perfectly safe, and calling Mom for a dumb problem like a blown breaker was going to make Mom think she was a baby who couldn't be left alone, especially when Mom was crazy busy and would probably be hard to get on the phone anyway.

She took a deep breath and felt her way through the house. Where was the nearest flashlight? After the outage the other night, it shouldn't be hard to find one. Eventually she located the electric lantern in the kitchen and turned it on. Everything was black outside the window with the yard lights off, which made her think of another thing to worry about, and she checked the locks, but everything was still locked.

Carrying the lantern, she went through the house to the breaker box in the utility room. She stood in front of it for a minute, trying not to let the DANGER ELECTRICITY stickers intimidate her too much, and then opened it and looked at all the breakers. She didn't know much about it, but they all said ON. So much for that, she thought. That was her entire list of electrical problem-solving skills exhausted.

"Come on, stupid old house wiring, why you gotta do this now," she muttered. There was probably a bad wire or something. Lightning struck a pole outside the house a couple of years ago and they had to have a guy come out and fix some things that Mom didn't know how to fix. What was that word? Oh yeah, a short in the system. Mom had said something somewhere in the house might have been damaged from the power surge in the transporter the other night, and that was why they kept having brown-outs and other weirdness. But it was easy to forget about it when everything was working fine. She was pretty sure Mom had forgotten about it.

And she had absolutely no idea how to fix it.

Or if it was going to cause a fire.

The power guy had warned them about that when he came out to fix the wires. Monica had enjoyed running around after him, bringing him drinks of water and lemonade, and he had talked to Mom about how lightning strikes could damage things in the walls and make wires ground out and cause sparks, and then you could get fires that burned down your house months later. It had made Monica a little bit scared and a lot glad that Mom had gotten it fixed professionally, and now here she was having to deal with it on her own, and she didn't know how.

She sniffed the air, but that didn't help, because there had been a little bit of a burned smell ever since the transporter had burned out.

_CallMomcallMom—_

But it felt so _stupid._ Living out in the country, she'd been through lots of power outages. It was no big deal, you just read by flashlight until the utility company got the power back on. And maybe that's all this was; she might not even have caused it herself. Mom was a half hour's drive away and super busy, and if she had to drive back home just for this and then back to the shelter, she'd be completely exhausted, and it would be Monica's fault.

_I could go over and ask the Bergers or the Harrisons or call Lindsey's dad or ..._

But instead, she turned and looked, in the dark, in the direction of the backyard.

There was another adult around that she could ask. One who knew a lot about electricity stuff and could probably at least tell her if it was likely to do anything dangerous before morning.

An adult who she was not supposed to talk to, who wasn't supposed to come in the house ...

But surely Mom didn't mean in case of _actual_ emergencies.

Monica was in such an agony of indecision and fear of burning to death in her bed that she was almost crying. _This is so stupid,_ she told herself, and got herself under control. She was just going to _ask._ He didn't have to come in. She picked up the lantern and marched through the house to the back door, screwed up her courage a bit, and threw the deadbolts and stepped out onto the back porch.

She saw him by lanternlight just in time to avoid running into him.

"Yikes!" she yelped, and backpedaled.

"Sorry!" he said, holding up his hand. "I didn't mean to startle you. I came over to see if anything was wrong."

That ... _could_ be true. She held up the lantern and squinted at him. He was wearing Lloyd Berger's slightly-too-short sweatpants and slightly-too-large Saints T-shirt, but he was also wearing something on his arms that glittered, reflecting green in the lantern light. 

"What's that?" she asked, staring at it.

"Oh." He actually looked a little bit embarrassed. "In case there were attackers, I wanted to be prepared."

Oh. Now that she got a better look, she saw that it was the arm pieces for the armor he and Mom had been fixing. Just the arm pieces.

"No, the power went out," she said.

"Does this happen a lot on Earth?" he asked. "It's very inconvenient."

Monica couldn't help laughing a little. She was already feeling miles better, having an adult to offload her problems onto. "It does, a little bit, but in this case I think I caused it by turning on the washing machine. I was, uh ... I was ... wondering if you could help me fix it? Or figure out what's wrong, at least? I don't want to call Mom if it's a problem I can fix myself."

"Your mother," he said thoughtfully, "told me that if I spoke to you while she was gone or came in the house, she'd find Ver—Carol and they would hunt me down and dismember me."

Monica giggled. "Yeah, that's Mom. I don't want you to do anything you're not supposed to, but ..." Some of her worry leaked out. "I'm just scared there's a short in the wires somewhere that's going to cause a fire and I won't know about it 'til it's too late."

"A valid fear," he said solemnly. "May I examine your house?"

"Uh, yeah. Sure."

She was expecting him to ask for a flashlight or where the fuse box was. Instead he held up his arm, and green light danced up the armor, a gentle firefly gleam. She was captivated.

"What's that doing?" she asked quietly.

"That? Oh—I'm running some diagnostics." He laid his hand on the wall. Monica continued to watch, leaning close.

"What's it doing? Is it like those boxes the electricity guys have?" She had been a little too shy to ask the names of all the equipment she had watched the repair guy using on the house, but Yon-Rogg's intent look of concentration made her think he was doing something similar. Except she couldn't see where the readout was. "Is there like a screen on there? Sorry, I'm asking a lot of questions. You can tell me to shut up."

He smiled slightly, a twitch of the corner of his mouth. "You don't have to shut up. It's sending the data directly to my neural system. The armor makes contact with my skin and interfaces with that, so I can get a heads-up display without needing to have the helmet up."

She didn't understand all of that, but she got most of it. "Whoa. Does Aunt Carol's armor do that too?"

"Yes," he said quietly. He took his hand off the wall. "That's very interesting. There's something interfering with the electrical power in the house. May I come in and look for it?"

"Yes, of course," she said, dancing back as the lantern's shadows swung through the dark kitchen with her movements. "Do you want me to—oh!"

This was because he had ignited a very bright light on the wrist of the armor piece. Holding it up, he shone it around the kitchen. There was a look of concentration on his face.

"Do you—um—need the fuse box?" Monica ventured.

"No," he said absently, shining the light around.

He strode through the kitchen into the living room, pausing occasionally. There was something a little bit scary about his intensity of purpose. Monica had, up until this point, seen him as an injured and slightly uncertain visitor, not seeming threatening at all. But now she was beginning to see why her mom was unsure about having him in the house. He wasn't _scary,_ exactly. He hadn't done anything to make her afraid of him. But that intense, competent capability made her think of Mom or Aunt Carol, the way that they moved in and took charge of a situation. And some part of her—the part that was growing into an intelligent and perceptive woman—wondered whether he'd been playing up his weakness slightly, so that Mom wouldn't be so nervous around him.

He paused in the doorway of the rec room. "Ah," he murmured.

He touched the wall, and then went directly to the closet where the transporter was, lighting up their way. Monica started to ask how he knew it was there—but of course he did. He'd come through it.

The closet door balked him, and Monica cleared her throat and moved in. "Um, like this," she said, and pushed on it, folding the accordion-style door.

"Ah. Thank you." He shone his light around the inside, touched the melted surface of the gate, knelt and touched the floor.

"What is it?" Monica asked, looking over his shoulder.

"I'm not sure," he murmured, his tone reflective. Still down on one knee, he ran a hand over the gate again, not touching it. "This should be completely inert. It's meant to be used once and then shut down, not normally in quite as ... er ... a _final_ way as it did for me, but after a single use, it's supposed to be offline. It shouldn't be drawing any power at all."

"But it is?"

"It's definitely still hooked into the system, at the very least." He shone his light over the tangle of wires where Mom and Aunt Carol had hooked it up to the house power. Now that Monica looked at it, that really did not look safe. Some of the insulation on the wires was melted.

"Stand back," Yon-Rogg said. Monica jumped back. He pointed his hand—flat, palm down—and a softly glowing blade made out of light sprang out of the cuff of the armor.

"Whoa," Monica whispered. He ignored her and slashed the blade through the wires. It bit through with no sign of resistance. She stood back and watched as he examined the gate on all sides, cut something else, and finally stepped back.

 _"Now_ it's off the system," he murmured, frowning at it. He turned to look at her, his face sharply angled in the harsh backwash of the wrist light. "When is your mom getting back?"

"Um, morning I think, she's probably working all night." She looked up at the ceiling. "You know, if that was what was causing the problem, how come the power's not back on?"

"A very good question," Yon-Rogg said.

So they ended up walking all around the house. She showed him the fuse box and he tinkered with it a bit, and then he traced some wires through the house and cut a small hole in the wall and leaned in and did some more tinkering. Monica followed him around, fascinated, and whenever she asked a question he answered it—not necessarily in a way that made sense, but he didn't tell her that her questions were stupid or try to make her go away.

"Do you have kids?" she asked, crouching beside him while he did something with the wiring behind the washing machine. "Back on Kree."

"No."

"Oh. Okay."

"Also, it's called Hala," he said after a moment. "My homeworld. My people are the Kree. The world isn't."

"Oh," she said, feeling her face heat. "I guess that makes sense. We're called humans, but the world isn't called Human. Though I guess it would be more sensible if it was, I mean, it's kind of weird that our planet is called Dirt, don't you think?"

"Mmm."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to babble. It's probably boring."

"You aren't," he said, quietly. "Boring me. You know, I used to train the youth divisions back on Hala."

"What do you mean, youth divisions, like ... school?"

"Perhaps." He concentrated on his work for a moment.

"So you're a teacher?"

"Mmm."

"I guess nobody's perfect," she said solemnly. He turned a flat, puzzled stare on her, and then she cracked up, giggling. He cracked a smile before turning back to the wiring.

Abruptly there was a click somewhere and all the lights came on. A moment later, the washing machine started up with a loud hum. Yon-Rogg was clearly not expecting this; he jerked violently away from it, fell against the wall, and brought up his arm with the energy blade.

"Whoa, whoa!" Monica cried. She grabbed at his arm, not really thinking about it, mostly just thinking that Mom was going to throw a fit if he cut a hole in the washing machine. "It's just the laundry. I set it up before the power went out. Sorry, probably should have mentioned that."

"Ah," he said in a faint tone. The energy blade vanished, sinking back into the wrist part of the armor. He touched a hand lightly to his abdomen and straightened up—he had fallen into a near crouch, hands flung out defensively—and Monica pulled back, a little embarrassed. Probably grabbing onto the alien killer to stop him from killing the washing machine was not the smartest thing to do. In her defense, he really seemed pretty nice, all things considered.

"So the power's back," she said brightly.

"I suppose it is." His voice was thready; he still had a hand pressed to his side.

"Are you okay?" Then she noticed the slick blue gloss on his fingers and soaking through the fabric of his borrowed T-shirt. "Whoa, you're bleeding. I think. Wow, you really do bleed blue." She knew that Aunt Carol did, _technically,_ but she had never seen it, because Aunt Carol was too tough to damage now that she had the energy thing in her. It was one thing hearing about it, or even seeing the dried bloodstains on Mom's clothes. But seeing the bright blue like wet paint on his hand was wild.

"No, I—" He seemed to become aware of the blue stain for the first time, and huffed out a breath. "Ah. Yes. That is ... not ideal."

He started to get up and sank back down. He looked really pale, and it began to sink in, for Monica, that she had a whole new problem on her hands.

"Are you all right? Do you need to sit down for a while? Please don't pass out, I'm not good at first aid!"

"Sitting down is probably a good idea," he murmured, and he leaned back against the wall.

Monica had no idea what to do. The lantern had fallen to the floor where she dropped it when she had to stop him from murdering the washing machine, so she turned it off and put it on a shelf. Would 911 come for a hurt alien? Would that just make things worse? 

"Do you need the first aid kit? Can I do something?"

"Just give me a minute," he murmured, leaning his head back against the wall. "Sudden movements ... still not a good idea. And the gauntlets draw a lot of energy. Though actually ..."

He laid his hand flat against his bleeding side. Green light flickered up and down the armor that wrapped around his arm and shoulder like a jointed, segmented second skin. The light flowed across his fingers and cast glimmering reflections around the utility room, like they were underwater. Green water, but still cool.

Monica forgot her fear that he was going to pass out and die on the utility room floor, and leaned forward, fascinated.

The green light died. He let out a breath and took his hand away, flexing the sticky, blue-stained fingers like they were numb.

"What did you do?" she asked.

"A little Kree first aid."

"Did it help?"

"Somewhat." He took a few deep breaths, clenched his teeth, and got to his feet, holding onto the washing machine. Monica wasn't sure whether to offer help, but she was too shy to try before he managed on his own. He was still a little pale, but not as bad as a minute ago. 

"I didn't know you were hurt that bad," she said. "Is this still from the other day?"

"It's getting better," he said shortly, and Monica recognized that particular form of irritation. It was how Mom got when she was sick and thought she could do all the things she normally did and then ended up laying on the couch all afternoon because she had wiped herself out. 

He also just seemed to have noticed that he'd left a blue handprint on the washing machine. He looked at his hand and grimaced.

"There's a, uh, sink, in the corner there," Monica said, and pointed him to it. "Is this—I mean—should you see a doctor?"

"I don't need one." His voice was cool and abrupt. "At least nothing your world has to offer. My kind heal faster than yours."

"Okay," she said, because that was definitely the tone of an adult who was not in the mood for questions or backtalk. "Can I ... get you anything?"

She got a sense that he started to say no, then changed direction. "I could use a food or drink with fast energy to replace the energy drain from the gauntlets. Something with sugar in it, if you have anything like that."

"Do I _ever_ have something like that," she said in a rush of relief. Here, at least, was something she could do to help. "Have you ever had ice cream?"

"Ice cream?" he said.

"It's a treat, like—frozen milk with sugar and flavors, and—look, I'm not explaining very well, but it has _lots_ of sugar. I can get some for you."

He stared at her with those unreadable golden eyes, and then he said, "All right."

"Yay!" Monica announced, and dashed off to the kitchen. She looked up from rummaging in the freezer to see him standing in the doorway, still looking tired and pale, the healing scar on his face standing out vividly against his pallor. "I ate up all the Rocky Road, because it's the best one, but there's Neapolitan and cherry chocolate chip. Which one do you want? Oh, I can cut up bananas on it! And there's walnuts. Let's do the cherry chocolate chip, that would be good, don't you think?"

He opened and closed his mouth, and then he smiled a little and said, "Do what you think is best. You're the expert."

"This will be _awesome._ You'll see. You'll go back and tell everyone on Hala about it. Oh, you might start a new trend! That would be cool."

"I'm not going back to Hala," he said, so quietly that she barely heard it over the clinking of bowls as she got them down from the cabinet.

"What?"

"I'm not allowed back on Hala unless—" He sucked in a quick breath. "I'm not allowed back. I was kicked out of the military, and my people now hunt me as a traitor. That was one reason why I came here. I couldn't go home. I have nowhere to go."

"Oh," Monica whispered, her mouth rounding. "Is that, um—where are you going to go, then? When you and Mom finish fixing your suit?"

"I have no idea," Yon-Rogg said quietly.

"Oh. I ... I'm sorry."

"Don't be," he said, and smiled at her. It was very tight around the edges, but then it relaxed a little, and reached his eyes. "Is that frozen? Because it's going to melt."

"Oh, shi—iiiitake mushrooms," she muttered, and grabbed the carton.

She emptied the carton into the bowls, and then cut up bananas and put on handfuls of nuts and topped it with chocolate syrup from the Hershey's bottle. And all the while she thought about never being able to go home, about having Heather and Lindsey and Lecia and Angel pretending they had never known her, about never being able to see Mom again ...

She was glad she had gotten out the big bowls. This was an all-ice-cream-on-deck situation.

"Maybe it's good you don't have kids," she said, turning to hand the bowl to him with both hands.

He took it from her carefully. "Why?"

"Because it would be even sadder," she said, "if you couldn't see your kids again. I can't even think how sad Mom would be if she had to leave and never come back, and leave me behind." She turned around to reach into the open silverware drawer and got out two spoons. "Here. C'mon, let's go outside."

They sat on the back porch to eat. Somehow that felt more like following Mom's orders than eating inside, technically speaking.

"Do you feel better?" Monica asked around the spoon in her mouth. "Is it helping?"

"Much," he told her. He was moving a little better now, less stiff and pained.

"What do you think? Is it good?"

"It's good. Yes." He was finishing off his bowl in record time. This guy really could eat. Aunt Carol was like that too.

"I think about Aunt Carol out there sometimes," Monica said, looking up past the porch light to what she could see of the stars. "She must be lonely."

"I don't know about that." There was a wry note in his voice. "She's good at being alone, always has been."

It was easy, sometimes, to forget that he had known Aunt Carol almost as long as she and Mom had. "I bet she misses Earth though, don't you think? I mean, I would. All the plants and animals and people and things. Did she—"

 _Ever talk about us,_ she had started to say. But she stopped, remembering that Aunt Carol hadn't remembered her Earth life at all when she was on Kree—on Hala. Mom and Aunt Carol wouldn't talk about much of that with her. It was that thing adults did where they made things seem even worse than they probably were because they _wouldn't tell you stuff,_ so you ended up making up your own versions, and you got most of it anyway from listening to grownups talk with each other.

So she didn't know all the exact details. But she knew that the Kree had taken Aunt Carol and put Kree blood in her and made her think she was one of them. And then she had come back and remembered Mom and Monica, and saved Earth, and now she was amazing and could blow up whole entire spaceships, but she wasn't human and would never be human again.

And Yon-Rogg had caused all of that.

Monica stuffed a large spoonful of ice cream and banana slices into her mouth, although she had lost most of her appetite.

Yon-Rogg didn't say anything. He scraped his bowl with the spoon, while she chewed and swallowed.

"Why'd you do it?" she asked when her mouth was clear again.

"Do what?" There was an odd raspiness in his voice.

"Why'd you take her with you? Why'd you make Aunt Carol forget us? Why did you attack our world? Why did you do any of it?"

 _Life's complicated,_ Mom had said, but nothing had prepared her for complications like this, for someone who came over and fixed the wiring and also took Aunt Carol away from them and tried to kill people. She just didn't know how to wrap her head around it.

"I ..." He huffed out a long breath, and scraped his spoon around the edges of his bowl, although there was nothing left to scrape up. "For the good of the Kree ... is the glib answer. Certainly I believed that I was doing the right thing. That anything was worth it. No, maybe it's more accurate to say that I didn't even think about it. She had to be subdued, and then she had to be taken back—after she absorbed the power of the core, there really was no choice about that. Your mother is a soldier, correct?" Monica nodded. "If your mother was given orders from her superior officers, do you think she would follow them? No matter what?"

"I think she's supposed to," Monica said cautiously. She felt as if she had opened a Pandora's box and she had no idea what was going to come out next. "But ... Mom says, I can't remember what it's called, but she says there is a rule that if you're given orders you know are wrong, you aren't supposed to follow them. You _have_ to say no. It's part of your responsibility. Because otherwise you're just as responsible as the person who ordered you to do the wrong thing in the first place."

"I don't think Hala has a rule like that," Yon-Rogg murmured. "Anyway, how do you know when your orders are right or wrong?"

"Uh ... you just know, I guess? I mean, most people do. Is that why you can't go back to Hala?" she asked in a rush. "Because they ordered you to do something wrong and you wouldn't?"

His smile was lopsided and not very happy. "No, that wasn't the problem at all. In a way, it would be easier if it had been. But no. I ... suppose you could say that I haven't thought much about right and wrong in my life."

"Oh."

"Or I should say, it used to be simple. Right was what I was told to do, which was also right for Hala. Wrong was anything else."

"No offense," Monica said cautiously, "but that sounds pretty messed up."

"Does it? Then you are already much wiser than I was when I was much older than you."

Monica pulled up her knees and looped her arms over them. "You know, I like how you talk with me."

He made a strangled sound. "What do you mean?"

"That's the first time I've ever really gotten a straight answer out of anybody about Aunt Carol and the Kree and all of it. I like that you don't talk to me like a little kid. I bet you were a good teacher back on Hala. Actually," she added, "I kinda wish you were my teacher now. You could teach, I dunno, Kree history or spaceship maintenance or something. You'd be a lot more interesting than most of my other teachers."

There was a silence, and then he stood up abruptly.

"I wasn't a good teacher," he said. "I don't think I taught those kids anything worth learning."

He walked away, across the grass. She stared after him, and then slowly gathered up the bowls and took them into the house.

***

Mom woke her up by calling at zero-ass-thirty in the morning. It was barely even light outside.

"Mom, no," she moaned into the receiver of the pink phone by her bed. "Are you still there?"

"Sorry, baby." Mom sounded really tired. "There are still emergency services all over the place, and they haven't resolved the gas leak yet and then there was an apartment fire too. It's really been a night. How are things there?"

"Good?" she said blearily, and yawned and sat up, and then froze as she remembered that she had, in fact, broken a number of rules last night.

Luckily, Mom was too tired and too busy to ask about it. "It's going to be a couple more hours yet. I hope only a couple more hours. If not, I will definitely, for sure be home by dinnertime."

"Oh, poor Mom," Monica said, instantly sympathetic. "Is it awfully bad?"

"It's just one thing after another, is all. Listen, I'll pick up takeout on the way back. How about I bring Chinese?"

"Chinese sounds great." And there was only about a fifty-fifty chance that Mom would actually remember. Monica yawned again and rubbed her eyes. "Don't drive if you're super tired, okay?"

"Isn't that my line?" Mom said. There was a crash in the background. She sighed. "I gotta go. Call me if you need me, promise?"

"Promise," Monica said, with just a tiny twitch of conscience, and then she hung up and remembered that the laundry was still in the washing machine. Oops.

She ran downstairs and put it in the dryer, and then ran upstairs and put on something other than pajamas, and looked out the window to see if Yon-Rogg was around. There was no sign of him—no wait—oh there he was, doing some slow stretches like a yoga kind of thing.

Hmm. Normally when Mom had to be gone overnight, Monica just had cold cereal for breakfast and occasionally for lunch. Was she supposed to feed Yon-Rogg too? She had forgotten to ask. She thought about calling Mom back, but then she thought the answer was probably no, or at best to leave something out on the porch like he was a cat. And he probably needed to come in and use the bathroom too, right?

She padded downstairs and reassured herself that she was only being a good host, not _technically_ breaking the rules. She unlocked the back door and opened it and called across the lawn, "Hi? Hello? Good morning! What are you doing?"

He slowly unbent from his yoga pose and crossed the lawn about halfway, then folded his arms. "You know you're not supposed to be talking to me."

"I know," she said, and hopped down onto the lawn, "but I needed to ask you about breakfast, which is a necessary conversation, and also, I got to wondering what you were doing out there."

His mouth twitched. "It's a form of Kree martial arts known as _hlatan._ Stretching and relaxation exercises, mostly. Promotes healing."

"Does it work?" she asked earnestly. He had really looked like he was going to pass out last night, but if she hadn't seen him like that, all limp and pale, she wouldn't have guessed now that he was so bad off. He looked much healthier and more confident and together. "Are you feeling better?"

"Much better, yes," he said.

"I'd like to learn some of that, if you wanted to show me. It looks like yoga. Or tai chi. My friend Lindsey is taking classes for that, and she says that her energy flow is really good now. Maybe you could show me sometime."

Now it was abundantly evident that he was trying not to smile. "Maybe you should tell me why you came out here in the first place."

"Oh, right. Breakfast. So, with Mom not here, it's my responsibility to feed you, right? I mean, you can't just starve all day."

"I've gone much longer without food than one day."

"Okay, that's actually kind of worrying, but anyway, there's no need for you to be hungry out here when there's lots of food in the house." She waved her hand vaguely in that direction. "Do you like cereal?"

"I don't know what that is."

"You're in for a treat, then!" she said, delighted. "We have _lots_ of kinds. Well, at least three kinds. Including ones with sugar, if you're still into that. Oh wait. Are you lactose intolerant?"

"I am not sure what that is either," he said, but he was following her back toward the house with a sort of baffled attitude that suggested he wasn't sure how this was happening and didn't know what to do about it. 

"Stay here," she told him, pointing at the porch. Keeping him outside was technically not breaking the rules, but she left the door open so she could talk to him through it. "So there's Cheerios and Cocoa Puffs and granola—that's Mom's—and, oh, like the very bottom part of a box of Froot Loops." She held up each box as she said the name. 

He blinked. When he realized she had stopped and was waiting for a response, he said blankly, "You pick."

"Okay, this is going to look weird, but it's actually really good," she said, pouring half Cheerios and half Cocoa Puffs into a bowl. "The Cocoa Puffs are too sweet by themselves but the Cheerios cuts the sweet and it's just really good. Oh, it's good with bananas too, and healthy! Did you like the bananas last night? That's the—this." She picked up one from the bowl on the counter. "Yes-no?"

"Do what you think is best."

"I sense skepticism," she said loftily, preparing a second bowl for herself. She sliced bananas on top, poured on milk, and stuck a spoon in each. "You have to eat it pretty fast because it gets soggy and it's less nice like that. Here, try it."

His verdict was "I think I liked the ice cream better," but he ate all of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you haven't seen [the deleted scene with Yon-Rogg teaching Kree kids](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OhGwz1wB-c), it is The Absolute Cutest and should definitely have been in the movie.


	4. Maria

Maria pulled into the driveway as sunset drew down to dusk. 

She had caught a couple of naps in the shelter office, but was still desperately, achingly tired. For a minute she just sat in the car, hands resting on the steering wheel. She rubbed her thumb idly over a bandaid on a cat scratch on the back of her hand. What a night. And a day.

But the house was still there. No smoking crater, no alien spaceship. 

Now that she had a few minutes to herself to think, she couldn't believe what she'd done yesterday. Leaving Monica at home alone overnight was no big deal. They had done it often enough by now for Monica to prove that she could handle herself just fine. She was a smart, responsible, resourceful kid, and Maria was always just a phone call away.

Leaving her with Yon-Rogg, though ...

_I can't believe I left her alone with him._

_I can't believe I trust him alone with her._

But on some level, she did. She kept trying futilely to convince herself: he'd tricked her, he'd done something to her mind like with Carol, it was all part of some master plan ...

But it wasn't that. What it came down to was that, while she knew full well that he was capable of betraying them, she really didn't think he'd hurt Monica. Not like this, not without reason. He had done a lot of terrible things, but he had never done it without a reason.

"Oh, crap," she said aloud as she got out of the car. She had promised Monica Chinese takeout and was so tired and distracted that she'd completely forgotten. They were too far out in the country for delivery. Well, there might be something frozen she could microwave. She didn't even want to think about cooking tonight.

She climbed the steps wearily to the front porch. The front door was locked. Good sign, that.

"Monica?" she called as she came in. The house was very still and quiet. Her chest clenched. "Monica? Are you taking a nap, baby?"

She climbed the stairs. The door to Monica's room was open, the bed rumpled but without a teenager in it. The window was also half open, and Maria went automatically to shut it, moving on autopilot. She had told that girl a thousand times that if you _had_ to have the window open at night, you needed to shut it in the morning because air conditioning costs money ...

There were voices coming in from outside. Maria took a single glance out the window, completely forgot about shutting it, and charged out of Monica's room, stopping only to get her gun out of the safe in the bedroom.

She slammed out the back door and strode across the lawn, the gun down against her leg. "Monica!" she barked.

They were on the grass in the spill of golden light coming out of the workshed, in the blue dusk before full dark closed down. Maria took it in at a glance: side by side, Monica stretching out her arms in a sort of tai-chi-style pose while Yon-Rogg went through the motions next to her, correcting her. 

"What are you doing?"

Monica yelped and they dropped out of the poses.

"Mom, he was showing me—"

"I don't care if it's Kree kung fu or opening up your third eye or whatever the hell. I told you to stay in the house and not talk to him. And I told _you_ —"

"That if I came near your daughter, you'd dismember me," Yon-Rogg said mildly. He held his hands up, palms loosely out. His gaze took in the gun with a brief flick of his eyes, but he made no move toward the armor piled under the shed roof.

"And what part of that was unclear to you?"

"Mom, listen," Monica said frantically. "We stayed out here because we knew you wouldn't like it, it's just that I needed to give him food and—"

"Whose idea was it, yours or his?"

Yon-Rogg opened his mouth, but Monica spoke first. "Mine," she said, folding her arms.

Well, there was that, at least. It meant she wouldn't have to kill him. Yet. "Go in the house."

Monica didn't move. "Mom, I'm not just going to sit in there while he's out here in the sun without so much as a glass of water, it's _rude._ "

She couldn't believe that Monica was picking now of all times to play the teenage-backtalk card. "I told you to go in the house. Did I stutter?"

"You should do as your mother says," Yon-Rogg said, low.

Maria whirled on him. "Stay out of this."

"You're being _really_ unreasonable," Monica complained, but she flounced back toward the house, while Maria took a few cold steps toward Yon-Rogg and had the satisfaction of seeing him take a step back.

"You're the adult here," she snapped. "I _told_ you what the rules were."

"I know," he said quietly. "Yell at me as much as you like, throw me out, but first, I need to show you something."

The heat of her rage drained away, a cool fear sliding into place behind it. She knew the serious undertone to his voice; it was a soldier's voice. "Did something happen while I was gone?"

"Not exactly. Sort of." He jerked his head at her, and went to the pile of armor, pausing to snatch up two pieces from the pile before he stepped off the concrete shed floor into the grass. "Come with me."

He strode toward the house. Maria followed, having to half-trot to keep up, occasionally stumbling in the dusk. _If he goes inside, so help me—_ But he didn't; he circled around the side. He was putting on one of the forearm gauntlets as he went.

"Hey, buddy, we've got rules about that."

"I know, but it's necessary." He stopped in the long grass by the wall and turned around, holding out the other gauntlet to her. "Here, put this on."

She jerked back as if it was a snake. "Why?"

"I've been trying to think how to explain, but I think it would work better if I show you. This will let me do that. And," he added with a ghost of a smile, "if you don't like my explanation, you'll be properly armed."

"I'm already armed," she complained, but she stuck the gun into her waistband and took the gauntlet in a gingerly grasp. It was the jointed forearm piece, actually several pieces connected with flexible mesh. "How do I put this on?"

"Pull up your sleeve first. It works better on bare skin. Now clasp it around your forearm—like so—" He showed her with light touches to the gauntlet, demonstrating while his hands never quite made contact with her skin. 

The gauntlet closed over her forearm and wrist with a soft snap. Then something cold stung her skin; an electric zing raced up her nerve endings. "It bit me!" she gasped, clawing at it. "If this is a trap, I'm going to—"

"It's no trap." He caught her other hand lightly, let go immediately. "It's making contact with your nervous system. Do you feel it?"

She would have loved to say no, but actually she did feel something, like a kind of ghostly afterimage of her arm. She moved her arm carefully and rotated it. The armor was astonishingly light to move, like it was hardly there at all.

"Now do this," Yon-Rogg said, and laid his gauntleted hand on the side of the house.

Maria gave him an are-you-crazy look, but did so. The forearm armor had closed around her hand and palm, leaving her fingers bare. It clicked against the siding but otherwise was no different than touching the wall with her bare hand.

"Is this supposed to be doing something, or ..."

"Concentrate on the house, and the energy flow in the house."

"I have no idea what that means," Maria muttered.

"Hold on. The pieces of the armor can communicate with each other. I'm going to send you some data."

"Wait, you're going to wha—"

She broke off with a gasp as the world around her abruptly flooded with a tracery of soft green lines. But it was more than the visual changes. All of a sudden she just _knew things,_ an ever-changing array of data on temperature and composition and density as she shifted her gaze from one part of the wall to another. She could sense the studs and the electrical conduits in the walls and the hollow spaces of the plumbing.

"Oh, my God," she murmured, and turned her stunned stare on Yon-Rogg, who grinned at her—actually grinned, the first time she had ever seen that expression on him. "Is this how you and Carol see things all the time?"

"When the armor is on and engaged, yes. You have total control over it. Try telling it to turn off. You can say it out loud if it helps. That's very common as a concentration aid when you're learning how."

"Turn off," she murmured, feeling silly, but abruptly the information overlay was gone. "Turn on?" This was a little harder; she had to concentrate, and when she got it back, it was shaky and uncertain, appearing and disappearing as she turned her head. "Whoa, that's weird."

"Do you see it?" he asked, and she nodded. He tilted his head toward her hand, still resting on the house's aluminum siding. "Try focusing down to your fingers and what's immediately under them." 

She did. This was a little less overwhelming, and all of a sudden she was picking up the surface temperature of the wall—not in degrees, but a rough sense of its temperature relative to the air and her skin—and the stud underneath and the space of the room on the other side. Struck by sudden curiosity, she tried expanding her sensory awareness outward, and abruptly knew where Monica was: somewhere upstairs, probably in her room.

"Got it?" Yon-Rogg murmured. Jerked back to reality, she nodded. "You feel that there's an open space inside?" She nodded again, and he asked, "Can you feel anything unusual about it? I'm going to push some more data to you. This is an overlay of yesterday and now."

As the world flooded with information again, it occurred to her that he really _liked_ this. He liked teaching people things. He was enjoying her wonder, not in a superior way, at least she didn't get that from him, but rather, he was vicariously experiencing it through her.

No wonder Carol always spoke of him in such a mixed way, she thought. There was anger and well-justified hate, but also, Carol seemed to have good memories of her time with the Kree. And now Maria was starting to get why.

_Just because he's nice sometimes doesn't mean that he's not an absolute bastard at other times, Rambeau. Don't forget that._

"See it?" Yon-Rogg said, and she tried to focus in on whatever the heck he was showing her. Something to do with the electronics in the house. Realizing that she wasn't quite following, he said, "You've been having electrical problems, correct? Unusual dips and fluctuations in the power in the house."

"Yeah, I figured that the surge when you showed up fried something. We had problems similar to that when lightning struck one of our power poles a year or two ago."

"It's more than that," Yon-Rogg said. "See this bright spot in last night's readings, the way it fades in and out? The transducer was still on the power network until I disconnected it last night. Now there's a sort of hole there—feel it?"

"I don't understand," she said, trying to get a handle on the waves of information coming at her. "The transpor—transducer blew its circuits when you came through, right?"

"It should have shut down entirely," Yon-Rogg said. "It's meant to work that way. It's an emergency back door, an escape. An instant and complete shutdown helps prevent anyone from being able to follow or trace the traveler."

A cold hand clutched at her chest. "But it ... didn't?"

"The power surge may have somehow damaged its shutdown cycle. It's too badly damaged to function, but I think that, until I took it completely offline yesterday, it kept trying to run some sort of reboot. Unable to do that, it would start to power down and then power up again, causing unpredictable dips and outages in your power system."

Maria pulled her hand away from the wall and flexed her fingers. Her mouth was dry. "Those people who were after you. Could they trace this?"

"I don't know." His voice was very quiet. "Maybe."

"Damn it, Yon-Rogg!"

"I didn't know!" he snapped back. There was a sharp, hard note in his voice. "Do you think I wouldn't have run as hard and as fast as I could if I thought that was a possibility?"

"Leaving us to burn!"

"Would you prefer that I stay and make you both targets?"

"Why _didn't_ you go?" she demanded, struggling to peel off the armor. She found the right mental command and there was an abrupt slackening of pressure; it peeled back like a lobster's shell. 

"I needed your help," he gritted out between clenched teeth, as if the admission hurt him.

"No, last night! Your armor's damn near fixed. And you found out they might be coming here for you. _Because_ of you." She all but threw the gauntlet at him; he caught it absently without taking his eyes off her. "Why the _hell_ are you still here?" she shouted.

"What was I supposed to do, leave your daughter alone with the possibility of bounty hunters showing up at any moment?"

That brought her up short. "You expect me to believe that you stayed to protect Monica?"

"I don't care what you believe."

She stared at him, feeling as if the world had slipped sideways under her feet. "You did. You stayed to protect her."

He looked away, almost as if he was ashamed.

"Jeez." She ran a hand down her face. "Just ... give me a minute. This is a lot." Taking a deep breath, she turned a direct stare on him. "What are the chances they'll actually come here?"

"I don't know," he said, not looking at her. "There are too many variables. But it is possible."

"When?" she asked simply.

"There are a number of jump gates between here and the Barata system, where they caught me. If they got a fix on the transducer, well enough to narrow it down to the solar system, and came straight here—" He paused and raised his head to meet her eyes. "Soon. It's possible they could be in the system already."

"And if they do come here, what can we expect? How many ships? Weapons?"

"There were two ships. Bounty hunters cruisers. They cornered my ship and took out my engines before I could do anything about it. Between the two ships and minus the ones I killed, perhaps twenty or thirty people, well armed. But," he added, "they don't have anything like Kree battle armor. They're not Starforce. They're just a ragged bunch of mercs, not a planet-conquering army."

"A bunch of mercs who took you down."

He nodded without speaking.

"Weapons on the ships? Like, space-to-ground weapons?"

He nodded again.

"Right," she murmured. "I'm going to call SHIELD. I have to. I need them to know that alien attackers might be on their way to Earth."

"And what are they going to be able to do about it? Not to be insulting, but from what I've seen, your world is not exactly equipped with warship-capable defenses."

"You'd be surprised," Maria said grimly. "We have nukes. And they might also be able to get word out to Carol. I know they have more alien tech than they're willing to talk to me about. Then again," she added, turning on her heel, "I have, or at least I had, an alien transporter in the closet that _they_ didn't know about."

"Where are we going?" he asked, catching up.

"We're going to pack. Look, if they're coming here, they'll come _here,_ right? To the house?" She hopped up onto the porch and opened the door, then gave an impatient jerk of her head when he hesitated. "Yeah, whatever, the enemy of my enemy and all that. Don't make me yell through the doorway. Monica! Baby, I need you downstairs right now."

"What?" Monica demanded crankily, appearing at the top of the stairs. Then she saw Yon-Rogg behind her mother in the living room. "Oh, come on, seriously? You just bit _my_ head off for not treating him like a leper."

"Things have changed," Maria said. It came out absent, with her mind elsewhere. She was running through a mental checklist, similar to her emergency list in case of tornadoes and hurricanes. Important papers. Photo albums. Clothes. "You need to pack a bag, kid. We're getting a hotel tonight."

"Wait, what?" Monica's case of the teenage sulks dropped away; she was suddenly alert, her eyes roaming from her mother to Yon-Rogg and back again. "What's happening, Mom? Is it work again?"

"Not this time. We might have some alien company. Not the good kind. But we don't know for sure. Go put some things together."

Monica's mouth opened, questions clearly hovering on the tip of her tongue. Then she shut it and nodded and dashed off to her room.

She was a good kid.

"Move," Maria told Yon-Rogg. She pulled the box of important papers out of the credenza and left it in the living room. Those could go out to the car first. They were going to need overnight things, probably something to eat just in case they had to drive for a while. God—what to do with Yon-Rogg; take him along, leave him here? She hadn't even decided if she was going to tell SHIELD about him. "Your armor—it's about as fixed as we can get it with the tools we have here, isn't it?"

He hesitated briefly, then said, "Yes."

"So how well can you fight? How powered up is it?" She started opening cabinet drawers and closets. "And don't you dare tell me you haven't tested it."

"It's nowhere near fully restored," he said with a certain amount of reluctance. "I can fight in it. But it won't be able to take much damage."

Take him along, she thought, pulling out the collapsible suitcase she had been looking for. If it came to fighting, they would need him. The thought briefly crossed her mind of taking just the armor, but he knew how to use it and she didn't. And anyway, it would be—well—unfair.

Unless SHIELD had other plans. Damn it. She needed to call SHIELD.

"Could you go upstairs and tell Monica to stop what she's doing and go find the business card in my office?" she said without looking up. "She'll know what I mean." On some level she couldn't believe that she was ordering an alien killer around like one of the neighbors' kids, but she was too busy and harried to bother self-analyzing. She glanced around and he was still standing there. "Did you hear me?"

"Maria ..." It was, she realized, the first time he'd actually used her name. "I need to tell you something."

"Now? Seriously? Can it wait?"

"No," he said. "It can't. I haven't told you everything."

Maria turned around with her arms full of photo albums. "You mean, besides the alien warships that might be coming right behind you?"

"No, I just didn't know about those." He smiled slightly, but it failed to reach his eyes. "There's something you need to know about why I came here. I wasn't going to tell you. It doesn't actually affect anything, with the Rydri, that is, but—"

"But what?" she demanded, taking a step forward. She was very aware of the weight of the gun pressed into the small of her back ... and also the gauntlet on his right arm. He was still carrying the other. "I don't like the way you said that. Wait—come here—" She set down the albums on the coffee table, glanced up the stairs to make sure Monica was still in her room, then gripped him by the arm and yanked him unceremoniously into the kitchen, barely even noticing that there was no particular fear in touching him this time. "Whatever you're about to say, I don't think I want Monica to hear it. I'll decide if she needs to know."

"Fair," he said quietly.

"Okay. Spit it out. What?"

He took a deep breath. When he met her eyes, his clear golden gaze was steady. Wolf's eyes. "There is one way I can go back to Hala."

Her nervous guesses about what he was about to reveal ( _I came here to invade Earth, I'm not actually on the outs with the Kree, there's an invasion fleet right behind me_ ) splintered in confusion. "Don't take this wrong, but I'm not in the mood for a monologue about your fucked-up history with the Kree. You can tell me in the car."

His jaw tightened; he seemed on the verge of snapping something, but instead, he took a breath and walked himself down. "I can go back to Hala if I go back with V—with Carol Danvers' head."

Maria's mouth opened; it felt as if the air had been punched out of her lungs. She _knew_ they were enemies. And yet. "Oh," she said, a small, breathless sound, and took a step back, then another, putting the kitchen island between them.

"I had two thoughts in mind when I set the transporter on the Rydri ship for Carol's bloodlock," he said, his voice very low, his face still. "I was hoping to get away, just away. That part is true. But I was also hoping—somewhere at the back of my mind ... I thought I might be able to surprise her. Take her out. I know I can't beat her in a fair fight. I had never been desperate enough to try something like this before, but I was thinking—actually, I wasn't thinking of much. Either it would work or it wouldn't; either I'd kill her and win back my place among the Kree, or throw myself on her mercy."

Maria stared at him across the kitchen island. He looked back at her, unblinking.

"You came here to murder my best friend."

"Kill her or have her help me." His smile was more like a death's-head grin. "One or the other. Instead I found you. And ... I can't say the idea of taking you hostage and using you to get to her didn't cross my mind."

"Why are you _telling_ me this?" Her voice climbed the scale from anger to a furious, desperate hurt. She slipped her hand behind her, let it drift around to the back of her waistband, fingers brushing the butt of the gun. She didn't know if she could draw it before he deployed whatever weapons he had hidden in that armor. "Why are you telling me this _now?"_

His voice was a near whisper. "I don't know." And, stronger: "I didn't want to lie to you anymore."

"Fuck you and your honesty. Get out."

He tilted his head back; there was something like arrogance there. "You can't fight them alone. You saw what their weapons did to me."

"I don't plan to fight them at all. I sure don't plan to fight them on your behalf. Get _out._ Take your stuff and start walking, or flying if it's fixed enough to fly, God knows what else you've been lying about. Just go."

He stood there, looking like he was grasping for words, his face a strange mix of arrogance and hurt.

"Get out!" she yelled, and drew the gun, aiming it at his face with both hands. The armored hand jerked, a reflexive movement, and then he lowered it deliberately, nodded, and walked to the back door.

"If you try to fight them, you won't win," he said, not looking around. "You don't want to know what they'll do with the kid."

"If you don't start walking, I will put a bullet in your spine."

He went out and closed the door behind him.

Maria lowered the gun to the counter. She clutched the edge of the countertop for a moment and gulped down something that was almost a sob, though her eyes remained dry.

 _Fuck_ him. Why had she trusted him at all, after everything had Carol told her? What was _wrong_ with her?

"Mom?" Monica called from the living room. "Should I bring my math books? I've got a test on Thursday. How long are we going to be gone?"

"Just a minute, hang on, baby," Maria gasped out. She tucked the gun back into place with shaking hands. "Take whatever you want. We have plenty of room in the car."

Her whole body shook. It was the same kind of impotent, unbearable mix of rage and hurt that she had been dealing with her whole life, all those times when some part of her, some child that had never quite gotten the memo about what the world was really like, wanted to scream: _I thought the world was better than this, fairer than this, but it's not._ And some other part of her answered back: _What are you gonna do, then, cry about it?_

She got herself together and went into the living room. Monica was back upstairs; there was the sound of drawers being pulled out and things clattering in the upstairs bathroom. Maria climbed the stairs. It was a matter of moments to find the SHIELD business card in her office. She looked out the window while she waited through a series of clicks for someone to pick up. It was completely dark now, with just a faint glow in the west. The light in the airplane shed cast long shadows across the grass. She didn't see any sign of Yon-Rogg moving around out there, or anyone else.

The phone clicked again and a voice began speaking. "Hi, you've reached—"

"Hello!" Maria burst out. "I need to talk to—"

"—Shield Insurance. There's no one in the office right now to take your call—"

Maria's lips twisted. She hadn't even thought about what to put in a message; she was expecting to talk to an actual person. She looked out the window into the empty backyard again, and then strode across the hall into her bedroom and started opening drawers one-handed, tossing handfuls of underwear onto her bed. On the other end of the line, the message finished and the answering machine beeped.

"This is Captain Maria Rambeau. I need to reach Nick Fury. Or—actually this is more important—Carol Danvers, if possible." She took a breath. "We may be having an ... incursion. If you are who you think you are, you'll know what I mean. It may be centered on New Orleans and will involve ships with weapons. I won't be at the number I'm calling from for much longer and I don't have a cellular phone, although I'm starting to think I ought to get one. I—"

There was a staticky pop on the line and it abruptly went dead. At the same time, all the lights in the house went out.

"Oh _fuck,_ not again!" Maria yelped. 

She dropped the dead handset. At least the tethered, analog phones would still work even in a power outage. She groped for the one on the bedside table. The bedroom was pitch dark.

"Mom?" Monica said from the hall. "I thought it was fixed."

"Me too, baby." She picked up the receiver, and was confronted by a complete lack of dial tone.

A normal power outage wouldn't do that. The phones should still work, even if the electric base station of the cordless phone didn't.

_Could he have come back to attack us? WOULD he?_

"Mom?" Monica said, closer. "Should I get the flashlights?"

"Hang on, baby." The dispatch radio would _definitely_ work; there was a battery backup as well as the battery-powered smaller set, since it needed to be able to work during power outages and natural disasters. She pushed past Monica in the doorway and found her way to her office door, but as soon as she opened it, she knew something was really, badly wrong. The radio dial should have glowed softly. It didn't.

 _What would _do_ this?_ she wondered. She found her way to the radio in the dark and switched the knobs on and off. She could only think of one thing: an EMP, or something similar. Every electronic item in the house had gone out. 

Outside the window there was nothing but darkness. The lights were out in the entire neighborhood, maybe beyond.

Ice water ran down her spine.

"Change of plan, honey." Maria turned around and bumped into Monica in the dark. "We're going now. Move."

"But—" Monica began as Maria pushed her along. "My suitcase is in my—"

"No suitcases. We can come back and get them later." 

It had been dark in the bedrooms, but at least there was a little starlight coming in the windows. The hall was nothing but a flat, oppressive void, difficult to navigate without stumbling. Maria found her daughter's arm in the dark, and with her other hand groped along the wall so they didn't fall down the stairs.

"Mom, I don't understand. What's happening? Where did Yon-Rogg go?"

 _God help us, he might be in the house now._ She almost laughed; it was such a stupid, horror-movie thing. "He's gone. He left." God, but she hoped it was true. She found the stairs with the toe of her tennis shoe, and pushed Monica behind her. "You come down after me. Be careful on the steps, baby."

"He wouldn't leave us if there are aliens coming, Mom!" Monica protested from just behind her shoulder.

With one hand on the bannister, Maria drew the gun from her waistband. She couldn't see a thing. She wished she could remember if she had locked the front door or not.

"What's happening?" Monica's voice was starting to sound a little shaky. "Are you scared, Mom?"

"Course not, baby. You know nothing scares me." She touched her pocket, felt for the car keys. They could drive upstate to her parents', if they weren't followed. Or get what toiletries they needed from a convenience store and come back tomorrow.

"Uh huh," Monica said, mustering at least a small dose of teenage sass. "But really, Yon-Rogg's still here, right? He wouldn't—"

"He's not our friend, honey. He was never our friend. We'll talk about it later."

The living room felt full of ghosts and devils, with all its shadows and open doorways, but they crossed without incident aside from a few barked shins on chairs and end tables. They really _should_ have a flashlight, she thought, but she didn't want to stop to try to find one. And they'd be less obvious without a light giving away their position, anyway.

_We are updating our emergency plans in so many ways after we get out of this. I am having Carol get me some energy weapons, I don't care if it's in violation of a dozen space treaties. And an attached garage so we don't have to go outside to get to the car. And a backup transporter, and a decent space radio instead of having to go through SHIELD, because they're completely useless—_

"You back there, baby?" she whispered.

"Yeah, Mom." Monica's hand brushed her arm.

Maria took a deep breath and opened the door.

The night was black and wind-tossed, warm but with an undertone of coolness, and filled with the shirring of insects. Maria stepped onto the porch, moving with all the stealth she could muster. Her eyes roamed the dark lawn, picking out the glint of the car under the moon, the black mass of the trees. No lights anywhere. 

_It'll make us harder to see, going to the car. We can do this._

"Come on," she whispered, trying to sound encouraging. She laced her fingers through Monica's. "Ready? Let's go."

They crossed the porch. Down the steps to the gravel drive.

"Mom," Monica whispered.

There was fear in her daughter's voice. And then she realized there shouldn't be those silver reflections on the car.

There was no moon tonight, only the dim light of the stars.

She had been looking down, scanning the lawn and the edge of the trees for Yon-Rogg. She hadn't even thought to look at the sky.

It was above the house. It was long and dark, a black mass blotting out the stars, with silver running lights fore and aft. She couldn't see much of its shape, but there was something classically UFO-ish about it.

For a single instant, she froze, unsure whether to run to the car or back into the house. In the house, they would be trapped. With the car, they had a chance to get away.

 _They don't want us,_ she thought, her mind working through a frantic calculus of survival. _They want Yon-Rogg. I hope they get him and go away._

But she could hear his voice in her mind, through her own betrayed hurt: _You don't want to know what they'll do with the kid._

"Mom," Monica said again, louder. Her fingers tightened on Maria's in a convulsive clasp. It was a child's voice, scared and tiny.

_God help me, I don't know what to do._

The ship took the decision out of her hands. Lights flared all around it, and tiny comets began hurtling to Earth around her. One crunched down on top of the car, and she saw that they were people, each holding a rifle-type thing.

"Into the house, baby, quick!"

They reversed direction. Monica galloped up the porch like a young colt, and Maria ran after her. At the door she turned around. 

The Rydri looked like big cats. Or maybe more like pictures she had seen of the Egyptian god Anubis, human bodies with long snouts and mobile, pointed ears on top of their domed skulls. They might not have Kree armor but they did have some kind of light Kevlar-like body armor, as well as rifles and some kind of actual _rocket pack_ , a belt that was where the flaring light came from that enabled them to fly.

One of the Rydri started toward the house. It raised its rifle. A light ignited on the end, pointing at her, and abruptly the cat-alien was nothing but a dimly-glimpsed shadow behind the light. It was a basic intimidation and house-clearing technique and there was no way not to instantly recognize the threat from her own training, especially when the rifle didn't lower even though the alien had to have realized that there were frightened local residents in his sights.

"We don't want trouble," Maria said loudly. "We'll cooperate."

An energy beam sizzled past her, blistering her skin and searing the doorframe. Monica screamed as Maria whirled her away and pulled her inside.

"Get upstairs!" Maria snapped. She slammed and locked the door, for all the good that'd do. It wasn't going to hold long against armed invaders with laser rifles.

 _We'll be trapped in here._ But there was nowhere else to go.

"Mom!" Monica called from the stairs.

"Coming!" The gun she had was the one from the gun safe; the other one she had retaped beneath the sink out of sight. She started for the kitchen to get it.

There was a tremendous crash from the kitchen and bright lights stabbed abruptly through the open-plan doorway from the kitchen into the living room. That crash was the door being kicked in.

Yeah. These guys were definitely the shoot first and ask questions later type.

Maria retreated to the stairs. At the top, she bumped into Monica.

"Mom, what do we do?"

What _were_ they going to do? There was another loud crash from downstairs—that would be the front door—and then something even worse, a thump on the roof.

They were about to be pincered from two sides. _Damn it, damn it._ "Stay behind me," she ordered, just as the first of the Rydri appeared on the stairs. At least their flashlights made them easy to target. Maria blew out a breath—so much for the peaceful solution, but these guys clearly didn't have diplomacy in mind. She took aim and squeezed off two quick shots.

The first shot made him stagger; the second, a head shot, dropped him. So they were vulnerable to guns, at least. Monica let out a squeak of mingled fear and horror behind her, but she couldn't react, not right now. Monica was _safe_ and that was the important thing. There was another Rydri right behind the first one and she got this one too before he had time to react—they clearly hadn't expected her to shoot back. Three more shots for that one. There were seventeen rounds in the Glock. Five down, twelve to go. She had a box of ammo in the bedroom, if she could get to it.

There was a concussive boom from the attic, and the trapdoor-style door in the ceiling blew off. Monica screamed.

Maria shouldered past her. When the first Rydri dropped into the hall, Maria took him out. The next one was smart enough to stay up top. There was a skittering light in the corridor, light blue but she was going to bet it was the alien equivalent of a laser sight.

"Escape ladder," she gasped, pushing Monica into the girl's bedroom.

When Monica was younger, Maria had gotten a roll-up escape ladder and installed it securely underneath the opening bedroom window in case of fire. They had practiced with it a few times; Monica thought it was fun. Now, in the dark, Maria shoved the bunk bed in front of the door to block it, while Monica moved in front of the window, a shadowy shape flinging the ladder out. It had metal rungs connected by chain, and sounded horribly loud as it clanked down the side of the house.

"They're out there too, Mom," Monica whispered.

Maria joined her at the window, while in the upstairs hallway, there were loud thumps.

She saw Rydri lights around the workshop behind the house, but none immediately under the window.

"We'll have to take the chance," she whispered. There was another thump from the hallway and a creak as the bunk bed was pushed partway in. "Go, go!"

While Monica scrambled out the window, she turned around and took aim. As soon as she had a clear shot, she took it. She couldn't tell if it was a kill or a wound, but the Rydri staggered backward. An instant later, a clear white bolt of energy knifed clean through the end of the bed, seared past her with a wash of heat and scorched the painted wall.

Well, that was definitely where Yon-Rogg's burns had come from.

Monica was out the window. Maria didn't bother with the ladder. She shoved the gun back into its impromptu holster, swung her legs out the window, and jumped.

She landed in a hydrangea under the window, and scrambled to her feet just as Monica dropped off the bottom of the ladder. Maria steadied her and drew the gun again.

"Where, Mom?" Monica asked desperately.

There was no chance of making it to the car. There was at least one Rydri out in the workshed, gun-light sweeping around as its owner searched the shed, but it was the only cover between here and the trees.

"Stay with me," Maria whispered. She pointed. "We'll run to there, then from there to the woods." It wasn't a good plan, but it was the only one she had. She knew the area well, and Monica had grown up around here. They could use the woods for cover and try to get to somewhere safer—a neighbor's house, the old culvert out by the pond, _something._

_Fury, Carol, I really hope one of you got my message, because if you didn't, I'm pretty sure we're fucked._

"Go!"

She gave Monica a little push, and they ran, trying to stay low, from the house to the shed. As they approached, the Rydri swung around to turn his weapon on them. Maria fired at him while pushing Monica down into the grass. Her shot went wide, but so did his; blue light seared past them.

There was absolutely no cover out here, no choice but to go forward. Maria gave Monica another hard push to tell her to stay down, and then rolled to her feet, firing, and ran at him.

He shot at her again, but was clearly startled enough by her sudden arrival that he was forced back several steps and the shot missed again. Then she was on him, forced into close-quarters fighting. He pressed something on the rifle and a blue energy blade slid out of it like a bayonet. It whipped past her head, buzzing faintly like the electrical hum of a transformer. She couldn't get a good shot and was down to just a couple of rounds, so she grabbed a wrench and swung it one-handed at the rifle. It hit with a jarring shock up her arm, but he held on, trying to jockey the rifle to get the blade angled at her.

"We just want to leave!" she snapped out. "We're not your enemies! You want Yon-Rogg, you can have him."

"Yon-Rogg?" he growled, followed by something else that she couldn't understand, garbled and half-snarled through the doglike muzzle. It sounded like an order.

"Mom!" Monica yelled from the grass.

Maria turned her head to see two more Rydri running from the house toward them. There was movement in the corner of her vision and then sparks burst in her head. She hit the concrete floor in what felt like slow motion, landing on her back. The pistol skittered out of her hand across the concrete.

But she still had the wrench. She rolled and swung with a two-handed grip, and hit the Rydri in the knees. Something gave with a crack, and he went down, yelling in pain. Maria scrambled to her feet. Her head throbbed and there was blood running into her eyes. She kicked him in the face and grabbed his rifle.

"Monica!"

Monica arrived in the shed, running. The Rydri were close behind her. Maria turned to put Monica at her back, and pointed the rifle at the oncoming Rydri. She squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

"Damn it!" There must be some kind of safety or user lock. But it made them slow down warily. She backed away, pushing Monica along with her, and put the project plane between herself and them. There was the crackle of an energy weapon and the propeller fell off.

"Mom, what are we going to do?"

If only she had an answer. Her head throbbed; she wiped her hand across her forehead, feeling it come away wet. Another shot scarred the metal of the plane, bubbling the paint. The Rydri were being wary, however; they thought she could use the gun. She fumbled with its controls, trying to find what was stopping it from working, but it was covered in moving parts and none of them seemed to do anything.

The woods seemed a million miles away, and she realized suddenly that there was only one option. Together, they would be a target, so she was going to have to give their attackers something else to think about. A mother bird would pretend to have an injured wing to lure predators away from its nest. _Smart bird._

"Monica, when I tell you, run for the woods."

"What about you?" Monica said immediately. Kid wasn't dumb.

"You know me, baby." She made one last attempt to figure out how to get the gun working, and gave up. Well, it was heavy enough for a club, anyway. "I can handle myself. I'm trained for this. Listen, do you remember that big culvert out by Oakley's Pond? The one I always used to tell you to stay away from? Go there, and get in it."

"Mom—"

"I think you're still skinny enough that you can get deeper in than they can. You should be safe there." Well, not exactly, but safer than anywhere else that was even remotely possible to get to now. This was exactly the sort of situation they had an emergency transporter for. _Carol,_ she thought, _if we get out of this, we're definitely getting a backup for our backup._

"But—" Monica began.

"No buts. Get ready to run. I love you." She leaned down and unhooked the airplane tiedown on her side, and gave Monica a little push. "Go!"

And she kicked the block out from under the near-side front tire of the plane, and pushed.

It was still tied down and blocked in place on the other side, but her side moved, and it began to rotate. The wing smacked into the supports keeping the roof up. There were yells, and the Rydri started shooting. Their weapons sliced the wing off. It fell to the concrete floor with a tremendous clang.

Maria sprinted out from behind the plane in the opposite direction to Monica. Energy blasts sizzled across the concrete behind her. She threw herself behind a large metal tool chest that absorbed the next shot, the metal crackling and warping as it overheated. Looking up from her position flat on the concrete, she glimpsed her gun, lying beneath a rack of shelves just a few feet away.

There was a scream. Maria looked around wildly.

Monica had been intercepted halfway to the woods. One of the Rydri dropped out of the sky on top of her, catching her with an arm around her waist. She screamed and struggled.

"Get away from her!" Maria bellowed. She hurled the useless rifle at the nearest Rydri and lunged for the gun. An energy blast singed her hair; she smelled the scorching stink, felt the wash of heat. But she got her hand on the Glock's grip and came up shooting. She took out one of her attackers and threw herself out of the relative protection of the shed into the grass. She had to get closer to Monica; she was too far away to risk shooting Monica's assailants in the dark. 

"Mom!" Monica wailed in terror.

_You don't want to know what they'll do with the kid._

She spun around and fired behind her, got off one shot before the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

Out of ammo.

Monica tried to squirm free.

Maria hurled herself bodily onto her daughter's assailant and bashed him in the head with the butt of her gun. He dropped Monica, who fell to her hands and knees on the grass. Maria caught an elbow in the stomach and was driven away, gasping. The Rydri whirled around, rotating the rifle to point at Maria's face. Behind him, another Rydri dropped to the grass and caught hold of Monica's hair. She began to scream in helpless terror.

And then the world lit up with green fire—a green streak, a comet—dropping out of the sky, igniting the air with a hollow sonic boom. The Rydri bounty hunter whose finger was tightening on the trigger of the rifle aimed at Maria went down in a single flash of green flame, half-severed, half-exploded by a fire-blade six feet long. The backstroke caught the one holding Monica, and she fell free and tumbled into the arms of a grateful Maria.

 _Carol,_ was Maria's first joyous thought.

It wasn't Carol.

Yon-Rogg's boots thumped into the ground in front of them, his body interposed between them and the shocked Rydri. He was wearing the full armor, except for his head, and it glowed faintly green. 

"You came back!" Monica cried, her voice choked with tears. Maria was speechless.

"Do you have a weapon?" he snapped over his shoulder at Maria.

"No," she gasped out. "Not one that works."

He flung out a hand and an energy shield bloomed over the three of them, catching the next laser blast from the rattled but regrouping Rydri. More were dropping from the ship. Still holding the shield with his right hand, Yon-Rogg gave his left a sharp shake, a sort of flip as if he were shaking water off his fingertips. The armor split all down his arm, peeled off and started to drop; he caught it one-handed and tossed it underhand at Maria without looking.

Just like catching a grounder in her softball games when she was Monica's age. She dived and caught it, and straightened up with the gauntlet clutched in her hands.

She was glad now for that armor lesson earlier, impromptu though it had been. She pulled up her sleeve for proper skin contact and laid the armor along her forearm. 

Another energy blast ricocheted around them. Holding the shield with one arm, Yon-Rogg clasped his bare hand over his wrist and dropped to one knee.

Maria finally got the armor seated and felt the sudden snap, the tightening like a blood pressure cuff as it sealed into place up and down her arm. It lit up with a brief green flash—Monica gasped—and then died away to a firefly glimmer. 

She took a deep breath and pointed her hand at the nearest Rydri. She had never used it as a weapon. She didn't know how. But she understood the basics of how it worked, at least. Think, concentrate, focus on your fingers—

The cuff burst into brilliant white light. She'd activated the flashlight.

"Oh, fuck this!" Maria screamed as the Rydri energy assault flared again, the backwash of heat stinging her skin. "Fire, damn you!"

A bolt of searing green light burst from the wrist of the gauntlet and speared through the Rydri warrior she was pointing at.

Monica shrieked, "Behind you, Mom!"

Maria whirled around and shot a Rydri who had just jetted in from above. She was getting better at it; the gauntlet responded like an extension of her arm.

She backed up instinctively until she was back to back with Yon-Rogg, with Monica enclosed between the two of them. She covered his back; he covered hers. For all his flaws, he was a well-trained and skilled fighter who had trained to fight as part of a team. She didn't need to say anything. They moved together; he turned to give her an opening and she fired at their attackers, driving them back.

"Can you fly Monica out while I distract them?" she asked over her shoulder.

He shook his head. "Not enough power."

"Take her, then. Get her somewhere safe."

"Don't be stupid," he snapped. "There's a better way. An easier way."

He turned toward the Rydri, who had fallen back under the double onslaught. "Hey! You there. I'm what you want. You know there's a massive bounty on my head back on Hala. What are they worth to you, a couple of primitives from a backwater planet? You can't get anything at all for them."

There was a hesitation before one of the Rydri snarled out, in a voice that was garbled but comprehensible, "Are you surrendering?"

"I'm saying we can come to a deal and they're no part of it. You know you'll lose more people taking me down if I don't come quietly."

"I can't believe I'm saying this," Maria said between her teeth, "but I don't know if I can let you do this."

"You have a better idea?" he asked, low and fierce.

" _Yes!_ Take Monica, put some distance between us—you can always come back—damn it!"

She hadn't seen the Rydri warrior closing on them with one of those gun bayonets until he was too close to avoid. In a surge of half-panic, her thoughts turned into a blank, senseless tangle and she couldn't get the gauntlet to do anything; all she could do was put her arm between the attacker and Monica.

Yon-Rogg turned, bringing his shield to bear on the new threat. It wasn't quite fast enough. The laser bayonet drove in under the edge of the shield, bit deep between two plates of the poorly-repaired armor. Yon-Rogg stumbled; the shield winked out for an instant and then converted to a blade. He sliced through the rifle and then beheaded the Rydri holding it. The green light of his armor glittered and flashed sparks and he staggered and went down to one knee. There was blue blood everywhere.

The next shot would have taken his head off if not for Maria blocking it. She hadn't even known that she knew how to do the shield thing; it was pure instinct, and she felt something sizzle painfully up her nerve endings, leaving her arm tingling and half-numb to the shoulder.

"The bounty was dead or alive," came the rough voice of the Rydri moving in with a rifle pressed to his shoulder. "No reason not to take you _and_ them."

Yon-Rogg tried to say something, probably sarcastic, and then collapsed.

Maria stood over him with Monica at her back, a warm body pressed close to her and trembling. Maybe if she could get the rest of his armor, she thought, it might be undamaged enough to—well—

To do what? Run with Monica? It was the only thing she could think of. At the same time, she was caught in an agony of indecision, even with the Rydri closing on them. You didn't leave a comrade in arms, you just _didn't._

"Mom," Monica said. It was a breath.

"Not now!"

"Mom, look up."

She did, a quick glance, all she could spare, but she was just in time to see the Rydri ship burst apart overhead in a long brilliant arc of light.

It flared like a dying star; it lit the blacked-out neighborhood in a bright, meteoric flash. Maria stared with her mouth open as the molten, flaring halves of the Rydri ship slowly and ponderous fell toward the trees. She could now make out, against the brilliance of the falling ship, a golden streak that caught first one, then the other, dumping them in a flaring pile in what used to be the two-acre stretch of woods between Maria's house and Oakley's Pond, and was now mostly charcoal.

Okay, _that_ was Carol.

This time, she wasn't wrong.

Almost casually, Carol cruised in as a meteoric molten gold flare, slowed to cast out a glimmering net with one hand, and hooked it around the Rydri, yanking them to the ground. They went down like bowling pins and the light continued to glimmer around them, slowly tightening. One of them tried to sit up and went down with a yelp, shocked into immobility.

"New trick," Carol explained cheerfully, and then the light around her died as she hit the grass and it was Carol, just Carol, with her warm humor-shot smile and bright eyes. Her hair was short now, basic-training short. "Miss me?" she said. And then she spoiled the banter by throwing her arm around Maria, her other arm around Monica, and dragging them in for a tight hug.

"Your timing's been better," Maria said into her shoulder.

"What are you talking about? Last-minute rescues, my specialty." Carol kissed the top of Monica's head and let them go. She spun around to drop to a knee beside Yon-Rogg on the grass. "Is that—it _is._ Well, that's someone I haven't seen or thought about in a while. Is he alive?"

"I hope so. He's actually kind of on our side," Maria said breathlessly. "At the moment." She felt dazed, and it was more than just the throbbing of the head injury. There was a tremendous sense of unreality to everything.

"Is he? Well, that's new." Carol looked up, tilting her head back, and a grin split her face. "Oh hi, there's our backup."

A long sleek shape drifted in, big and dark, over the trees. There were running lights on this ship too, elusive glimmers of rainbow lights up and down the sides. Maria knew it was only her current state of mind, adrenaline and endorphins blending into a euphoric haze, but it seemed to her that it looked friendly, somehow.

"It's a Skrull ship," Carol said, laying her glowing hands on Yon-Rogg's back. "I think there's room to land behind your house. Maria, I'm sorry, I need to stabilize him—can you go wave them in?"

It had been a while since she'd worked on a ground crew, but it was like riding a bike; you never really forgot. She used the glowing gauntlet in lieu of a marshaling safety wand and did, she felt, a very credible job of guiding a spaceship to land on her back lawn.


	5. Yon-Rogg

He woke aching and tired, his body leaden. He recognized, even before he tried to move, the faint tickle of a life support web.

Someone was speaking.

 _"'It had killed before it met us,' said Blackberry with a shudder,"_ said the small, light voice. _"'I saw the blood on its lips.'"_

He turned his head slightly, as much as he could move with the web holding him down.

The Terran girl came into focus, head bent over one of their thick-paged, primitive Earth books.

 _"'A rat, perhaps, or pheasant chicks,'"_ Monica said, reading aloud from the pages in front of her. _"'Lucky for us it had killed, otherwise it might have been—'_ Oh! Hello!"

Yon-Rogg twitched an arm and realized that it was more than just the life support web restraining him. He cleared his throat, and managed to get words out in a dry whisper. "Am I tied down?"

Monica's smile faltered. "Uh. Yeah. Sorry."

"It is a reasonable choice," he whispered. "I would have done the same."

Some time had passed, he could tell. Monica was wearing loose clothes not of Earth make, and her hair was twisted back in a braid. Actually ... realization came to him sluggishly that if they had decent medical equipment here, they probably weren't on Earth.

"Where are we?" he whispered.

"Oh yeah," Monica said. She glanced up at the ceiling. "It's called the Bright Wanderer. It's a Skrull ship."

Wonderful. He closed his eyes with a slight smile. After all that had happened, it was probably fitting that it would be Skrulls, in the end, who would execute him or turn him back over to the Kree for punishment. 

No point in thinking ahead to it. He could use a distraction. "What are you reading from?" he asked.

"It's called _Watership Down,"_ Monica said. "It's one of my favorite books. It's about rabbits."

"What are rabbits?"

"Oh. An Earth animal. Sorry, I guess you wouldn't know about them."

"It seems a very military sort of book," he whispered. "They are a fierce predator, rabbits?"

"Um. Yes," she said, smiling. "Yes, they are. Do you want me to read more?"

"Suit yourself."

After a moment, there was the rustle of a page being turned, and she began speaking again.

He wasn't aware of falling asleep, but there was a drifting sort of transition, and Monica's voice no longer spoke at his bedside. Instead there were soft rustles, the awareness of a presence that was both quieter and more restless than Monica's. 

And familiar.

He knew, he just _knew._ He cracked his eyes open and he wasn't wrong.

"Well, hello there," said Vers.

She was sitting beside his bed with one booted foot up on a chair, doing something with a small handheld device that involved holding it in both hands and using her thumbs. It was a little smaller than Monica's rabbit book.

"Did you have a chance to try a Gameboy when you were on Earth?" Vers asked. "They didn't have them when I lived there. It's new. The Skrull kids love them. It's addictive, I have to say. Monica has been showing me how to use it. She says it's already retro on Earth, but I think it's fun."

He only understood about half of that and wasn't sure what to say, so he said nothing. Vers put the game-thing aside and threw an arm over the back of her chair. She was wearing a Terran-style jacket over what looked like a modified set of Kree armor, garishly colored blue and red and gold. It was horrible. It was very her.

"Monica and the ship's doctor both tell me you don't have brain damage, but I'm not seeing any particular sign of higher brain functions, so I might have to tell them—"

"Am I your prisoner?" he whispered.

Vers paused and raised an eyebrow. "Well. Yes. Probably. At least until I find out how likely you are to try to kill me or try to take me back to Hala. 'Try' being the key word there."

"You talked to Maria."

"Well, yes? People communicate with each other. It's why we have language."

He scowled at her. She grinned brightly. Weariness washed over him, emotional as much as physical, and he closed his eyes again.

"Where are we going?" he asked without opening them. "Hala?"

"Oh yeah, that's a _great_ idea, cruise into Kree territory in a ship full of Skrull, why didn't I think of that?"

Yon-Rogg opened his eyes again just so that he could scowl properly. "So what are your plans for me? Prison? Execution? You probably know there's a bounty on me."

"I _have_ actually heard that," Vers said musingly, and her smile faded to a more serious look. "I talked to Maria and Monica quite a lot about you, actually. I hear that you don't have any particular plans at the moment. Just bumming around the galaxy trying not to get caught. That sounds like a hell of a life for someone who was as, well, goal-oriented as you always were."

"I'm sure you care a lot," he said between his teeth.

"I think it's exactly what you deserve, but also, I keep thinking that we could really use someone on our side with an in-depth knowledge of Kree technology and tactics, not to mention your fighting skills."

He lurched forward in an instinctive attempt to sit up, only to be brought up short by the life support web and restraints. This set him off in a coughing fit. Vers placed a light hand on his chest, gentle but inexorable, pressing him down.

"I can't believe you're trying to recruit me," he wheezed when he could speak again.

"Why not? What else have you got? You don't necessarily have to fight. There are a lot of options. We need people to guard the resettlement ships and the new homeworlds. We also need someone to train our troops. That's one thing we're really short of, actually, and ..." She gave him a crooked smile that hit him somewhere deep and sore. "Much as I hate to admit it, you did do a damn good job of training me. Not that I wasn't pretty good already, of course."

"You want me to train _Skrulls."_

"Well, if you're going to be like that about it, I could have them drop you into a volcano or leave you on a desert planet with enough food for a week and a beacon to call the Kree."

"Tough choice," he muttered.

"Ah, so you're still at the denial stage. Let me know when you get to resignation."

"I came to Terra to kill you."

Her expression didn't even change. "So I've heard—among other reasons. Well, all the more reason to put you where I can keep an eye on you. You know, we have a saying on Earth: keep your friends close but your enemies closer."

He stared at her for a moment, then whispered, "And you people say the Kree are messed up." 

Carol grinned.

***

He slept and woke and slept. Monica read him more of her rabbit book. Fierce creatures, rabbits. He liked them; he would have liked to have seen one.

A doctor came to see him, a Skrull in her natural, hideous state. He pulled away from her; she grasped his wrist with dry, scaly fingers, and did not look in his face while she examined him. She disliked him, he gathered, as much as he disliked her.

When he finally had strength to get out of bed, the Skrull doctor gave him loose, pale yellow scrubs to wear, and snapped a pair of metal bands on his wrists, which he submitted to only because the Skrull guard at the door looked like she meant business, and he knew he couldn't take any of them in a fight right now. Also, even if he did somehow escape from the sickbay, Vers was on the ship somewhere and would probably enjoy taking him down again. He was much too sore for a fight.

"These will give an alert if you enter forbidden areas of the ship," the doctor said, her bald, scaly head bent over the cuffs as she adjusted them. "Is that comfortable?"

"Does it matter?"

She didn't answer that, merely loosened them slightly. "You are allowed in the sickbay and the ship's mess and lounge, as well as the corridors between them. If you try to enter other areas of the ship, security may use them to incapacitate you. For what it's worth," she added, "I'm sorry. It was not my idea."

"I'm sure you'd enjoy seeing me taken down."

"I do not hate you for what you are," she said, collecting her instruments in a small case.

"I don't believe you."

She left without speaking. After a little while, he got up, and practiced walking around the room a bit before he risked leaving it. The guard shadowed him silently.

For the first time he got a look at the ship he was on. He had already guessed it was a captured Kree ship from the style of the sickbay, but now he classed it as a cargo ship, refitted for whatever they were using it for. It wouldn't have much in the way of armaments, and he realized that he was running through possible plans for taking it over and/or trying to pass the information on to the Kree army. But when was he going to have a chance to do that? He could barely walk around without doubling over in pain. He wondered suddenly what had happened to his armor, and if he'd ever get it back.

The mess and lounge turned out to be one long, narrow space along the outside of the ship's hull, with large windows looking out at the stars. It was nearly deserted, and the only person there who was not a Skrull was Maria, sitting by herself at a table in front of the windows with a beverage bowl and a reading pad.

She looked up and saw him. He wrenched his gaze away, found a drink dispenser, and poured a small bowl of something which was at least vaguely recognizable as _klata_ , if a bit too sharp and astringent. By now he was starting to regret this long an outing; he was already exhausted. Keeping his head up, moving slowly and carefully, he took the bowl over to a seat by the window and tried not to think about having to walk back.

The guard took up an unobtrusive station by the door. Lots of trust they had for him. Well, he didn't blame them.

After a few minutes, Maria came and sat down across from him. She was wearing an Earth jacket over Kree worker-class coveralls and had a faint, almost invisible healing web pressed to her forehead under her hairline. He hadn't realized she had been hurt.

"I hear Monica has been reading you _Watership Down,"_ she said.

"Your idea or hers?" he asked, when she didn't go away.

"Hers. She loves that book."

"Ah. Rabbits."

"Yes, rabbits." 

She was quiet, and, after a moment, reluctantly, he looked at her. She held a _klata_ bowl in her hands, swirled the contents between her palms. 

"So this is what you have instead of coffee," she said, and took a cautious sip. Her distaste was evident, even though she seemed to be trying to hide it.

"It's a common drink on many worlds. This is not very good _klata."_

"What's good _klata_ like?"

"Hard to describe. How would you describe coffee to someone who had never had it?"

"Hmm," she said. "Good point."

The deck hummed gently underfoot with the vibration of the ship's engines. "No one will tell me where we're going," Yon-Rogg said.

"They won't tell me either. It's classified, I think. A refugee world, where they're dropping off some people before heading back to Earth to drop us off."

He didn't say anything, aware that he was included in neither category.

"Thank you," Maria said quietly. "For coming back. For saving us."

He shrugged, which hurt. "Come to find out, if I'd gone my own way, V—Carol would've shown up anyway. It was pointless."

"Oh, stop it." Her voice was curt. "If you hadn't come, Carol wouldn't have been in time. You know that. You saved us; you saved Monica." She took a breath. "Do you need a place to land for a little while? There's a guest bedroom in the house."

He had absolutely no idea what to say to that. So he didn't say anything.

"Granted," she added, "there's going to be a lot of fixing up needed. The house is, not to put too fine a point on it, a wreck. Before we took off for Betelgeuse or wherever, Carol slapped plywood over the front and back doors and did a quick patch job on the roof to keep the rain out, and—oh _shit,_ I forgot to clean out the fridge before we left. So yeah. Mess. Which is largely your fault. I'm not cleaning all of that up by myself."

He narrowed his eyes at her, unsure whether it was some sort of game, probably orchestrated by Vers as a punishment. Or something.

"You led aliens to my house." Maria took a sip of _klata._ "You owe me, buddy." She made a face. "Okay, no, I'm going to stop being polite. This is _terrible."_

"It is—"

"Culturally significant, yeah, I get that, but no, I'm sorry, it tastes like watered-down horse piss. I'd give my left arm right now for a cup of decent coffee. Or even a cup of terrible coffee. Hell, I'd settle for hot cocoa."

"I was just going to agree that it is indeed terrible."

"Oh," she said, and snorted a laugh into her bowl of _klata_. He smiled slightly.

"I'll show you a trick for making bad _klata_ more palatable," he said. "Wait here."

He got up, forcing his stiff and painful body to obey him, and limped over to the food and beverage dispensers. The Skrulls in the lounge were all watching him as stealthily as they could, which wasn't very. One of them was a kid—or at least it looked like a kid; who knew what age it really was. Well, if they wanted evidence that the enemy wasn't much of a threat, all they had to do was watch him walk across the room.

He checked the labels on the dispensers and found that the Skrulls had kept the basic Kree food dispenser installation. Good. He topped off his bowl with fresh _klata_ , got another for Maria, and dispensed a #6 food bar out of the machine. He crumbled a little of it in each bowl and took it back to the table.

"Here," he said, passing it across.

She sniffed and took a cautious sip, and then looked surprised.

"Whoa. That actually is ... not terrible." She took another drink. "Actually, it _is_ sort of like cocoa now. Or like a liquid cupcake. Except not too sweet. What'd you put in it?"

"Dessert bar," he said, holding it up. Maria held out a hand; he passed it over to her. "Kind of dry on its own, but it harmonizes with the _klata_ particularly well."

"Soldier tricks," she muttered, taking the dessert bar. She took a small bite and grimaced. "You're right, that's terrible. It's like sawdust held together with sugar. But it works okay with the—what'd you say it's called?"

" _Klata_."

She smiled lopsidedly. "Carol and I used to combine dry cocoa mix with instant coffee crystals and eat it straight out of the jar. It was, objectively speaking, awful. But when you'd been up for twenty-four hours straight and just got in from jogging ten miles with a pack on, it tasted great. Like mainlining energy straight into your veins."

Yon-Rogg didn't know all the words, but he recognized what she was talking about. The military was, it seemed, in some ways the same the universe over. He tried a small sip of the adulterated _klata_ , unsure how his stomach would handle it. It was strange how taste could take you back, made him think of sitting around a duty station with the others—with Vers—

His hands were shaking, threatening to spill the liquid. He set it down.

"Anyway," Maria said, as if there had been no interruption in the conversation, "you don't have to give me an answer right now. Just think about it."

"You really think the Skrulls are going to let me go." He held up his hand and rotated the wrist to show off the cuff.

"I think if Carol decides they're going to, there's not much they can do about it."

"She wants me to join the war on the Skrull side." He still couldn't quite believe it, though he wasn't sure what baffled him more—that she thought he'd go for it, or that she actually wanted him to.

"I know," Maria said. "It was my idea. Or, I guess I should say, I suggested you might be good at training the kids. Monica said you were a teacher back on Hala."

"Monica is a child," he said tightly. "You know what I taught them, don't you?"

"Brainwashing? Indoctrination? Doing their patriotic duty for the glory of the Kree?" When he looked at her, she gave him a quick grin. "What part of 'Carol and I have been talking about this' did you miss? Don't tell her I told you this, but she agrees with me that you'd be good at it. She wouldn't have asked you if she didn't agree. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's pretty hard to get Carol to do anything she doesn't want to do."

"You've got that right," he muttered.

"Anyway—think about it. Go home with us, stay on the ship: either one is an option. Or you can do one for a while and change your mind later." She stood, picking up her _klata_ bowl. "Now, if you'll excuse me, Carol is going to give me a space navigation lesson. Oh, right! I almost forgot." She reached into her pocket and laid down an Earth book and a reader on top of it. "Monica's been busy with the Skrull kids, but I told her I'd make sure you got this. It's the book she was reading to you. I know you won't be able to decipher our alphabet, but—" She tapped the pad. "Kree to English translation. I've been using it to go through the astronav manuals on the ship. You can have it read to you. Have fun."

He laid a cautious hand on the book and pad. "I don't understand you," he said simply. "Any of you."

Maria stood looking down at him. "You know, up until a couple of days ago, I would have said I didn't understand you either. But you came back for us. You saved my kid. That, I do understand. Enjoy the rabbits."

She strode away, across the lounge. She reminded him of Vers, he thought. He had liked fighting beside her. The future was still a question mark, huge and frightening, but—there was something _there_ now. Options that were something more than an endless, losing running battle; more than anger and fear, and trying to win his way back into an Empire that had thrown him away like a broken toy.

After a few moments, he pulled the book toward himself, and opened it.


End file.
